Cultural statement, might it be? Or economic? This week Lucien Freud's painting of a fat woman sleeping sold at Christie's contemporary art auction for $33.6 million, making Freud the world’s most valuable living artist. Judging from the $348.2 million sale, the art market is going strong.
A sign of our big times...
Obama is visually viral. When driving to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, I passed this iteration of the Obama poster, left, painted on the side of a building. I'm just now getting to post this as I work through things after being gone from Santa Fe for days and days. While I was in Texas, the tv had the pope on everywhere that day I spotted Obama painted on the yellow bricks and a parody of the pope, right, in the style of Shepard Fairey's now famous Obama Poster was circulating.
Looking at political communications, visually, in with media studies this week, the visuals that stand out among the loud blabbering on cable and in the blogosphere during this pivotal and perhaps most decisive political week are most indicative of all.
I've pulled these Obama Poster parody iterations to show how the fight was playing out with reiterations of Fairey's graphic. The poster in print has gone viral, as I knew it would when I wrote Political Art and the Power of Visual Images.
One of my favorite recent political quotes early on in the week (just so we're not totally visual) is by James Carville, commenting on Hillary and Obama: "If she gave one of her cajones to him, they'd both have two." ha.ha. Seriously, I am highly entertained by the visuals by artists and photographers rather than the comments of the punditry. Soundbites and snippets are what we're about, socially and culturally.
The visuals tell the story so I will give you the two oppositional favorites of mine from this week with the leading Hillary graphic on 5/8 from The Drudge Report, right, which ran just above a headline, "No Way" juxtaposed with this week's Time magazine, just out, with the relaxed smiling Obama with the huge headlline, "And The Winner* Is..."
Back in September 07, I thought Hillary had the edge, as I wrote in Hillary Pop Iconic: Leading by Visual Image.
The tide shifted w/ the Obama poster. If you look at graphic imagery as produced, reiterated and shared online, Obama's fans are winning creatively. This shift occurred in early April. I found the Mamas for Obama graphic for sale on a t-shirt you can buy on Zazzle.com. Me, I'm just following the art and media for political communications interests and digging deep on issues in order to make up my mind.
On another media note, Webby Awards have been announced and CyberJournalist reports results (and, no surprise, WashingtonPost is sliding online, and my once very online with it local paper, The Santa Fe New Mexican, is falling way behind w/ online trends):
*Multiple winners such as: NYTimes.com (8); The Onion (7); National Geographic (4); FactCheck.org (3); BBC (3); TESPN.com (3); and CondeNet (3).
* 27 sites won both a Webby Award and a People’s Voice Award including: Huffington Post (Blog-Political), PostSecret (Blog-Cultural), FT.com Alphaville (Blog-Business), National Geographic (Magazine), NYTimes.com (Newspaper), FactCheck.org (Politics).
Do you ever stumble by something and then it sticks with you? That is the power of art, but an idea can hit you unexpectedly in other ways via various media. I term this the art of the stumbling think -- something that engages your mind and forces you to process the idea into your own mental existing structures and frameworks. Books are a form of a stumbling think, because you ramble mentally and get hit with an unexpecteded idea that makes you mull. They can take you to imaginary places beyond your own environment. The art of living requires active engagement. The art of a stumbling think is not rambling through tv channels to find something that is passively engaging.
Memories are made with a tie to emotion and new ideas require mental processing. The public artwork of powerful graffiti artists therefore, sticks in your mind because it engages your thinking about norms. TV or radio talking heads might engage you but ideas are passed to you full and complete, even though they may - even subliminally or overtly engage your emotions. Stumbling thinks require unexpected mental processing and that is the art of it - the surprise that you have to take your mind and wrap it outside of your own box of ideas of reality.
Banksy, an anonymous graffiti street artist, makes public statements with his work and is an artistic example of the idea of the stumbling think. He reminds me of Shepard Fairey who most recently did the Obama posters that were used for street punctuation. We don't have the walkable cities as much for the platform. Santa Fe's most walkable areas are the plaza and Canyon Road, both featuring art but most are struck with the stumbling think of the cultural statements everywhere here -- architecture, art, and beauty. Travel can give you stumbling thinks galore as it gets you out of your normal routine and thrusts you into spaces and places that make you encounter and absorb with all senses different cultural approaches and creations.
Think of rambling by Banksy's work on various street walls... you couldn't help but notice... and think. Imagine if this surprise hit you on your normal everyday errands in your own habitual ramblings. These children, at top right on a London wall, are raising the flag to Tesco, a store. A statement of patriotism to consumerism it is, this. The flag as an idea is not what you would expect. Check out Banksy's site for other works.
The stumbling think is something that is so available via links that an online ramble will engage as well. You don't have to leave your computer to encounter variation from your humdrum routine. I could take this philosophically deeper but masticate, please if you will, on the idea of the stumbling think.
We are. And we should foster art appreciation. Look at children at play. At some point art and creative works become things that are judged. Do we create for ourselves or for others? If for others, when does creative expression become categorized as folk art, personal art, outsider or fine art? Is the cost the determiner? We're missing out on art as a way to live.
Are Smart People Drawn to the Arts or Does Arts Training Make People Smarter? I'm glad to see this getting attention, as two of my children participated in a parent-volunteer program, Art A La Cart -- with a k - 8 curriculum taught bi-weekly for art appreciation. I think it does make a difference ; the article says, "children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas...to discover how the performance and appreciation of the arts enlarge cognitive capacities will be a long step forward in learning how better to learn and more enjoyably and productively to live."
You, too, can have this art poster by Andy Warhol. Although he is most famous for his pop art, his love of popular culture, his passion for collecting, his personality and his sayings are fodder for study as expressions of our times. He is most famous for his saying that we all have our 15 minutes of fame.
I think to be we have to create and this act of living is crucial to our very being. What happens to how we do this is something I am curious about and I wonder if this is telling about our society.
But this quote - art is what you can get away with, is a cultural statement more than anything. I might change it to art is what you do to enhance your life. Would you agree?
Reading culture from magazine covers is an art in itself. What is communicated through cover art, what do we read by design? Men are in a messy confused state. That's the message.
Cover art teases consumer interest by provoking curiosity to purchase in order to obtain what is inside. This applies to book covers and (used to be) album-turned-CD covers. The latter entered its heyday when albums were big and the tunes couldn't sell themselves as they buyer handled the product in the stores. So, a little deconstruction of the art is in order in a comparative cover graphic post focused on one of today's leading cultural men. What's the pull here?
What is the mess of March coverman George Clooney? Who is the target audience and why? What does this say? Do moms want to know? Probably not. Single women? Probably not for Esquire. (Men under 34 are the heaviest readers of magazines.) Men, wanting to know what is the appeal behind the man? Why he is such a leading man? Is there dirt here? Conflict of a mess, waiting to be told? International movie star George Clooney on the covers of Esquire for March and the NYTimes March 9 Sunday Style Magazine, is attention-getting for the fact that they both indicate messiness (click to enlarge the photo). The NYTimes has him pictured in an extreme close-up all grossly dirty and messy while Esquire features him all cleaned up casual with a messy teaser. Media stats show that older men - 55 and up - are the heaviest readers of newspapers, but I bet the NYTimes Style mag appeals to younger guys (35 and under, the diamond bracket to appeal to for marketers --hence the edgy dirty face).
Equire's lead story highlights Coverman Clooney with a big headliner. The lead header above is his first name George (oh, his head is the O -- interesting graphic for the second most interesting leader nationally known by that name and so intimate - we are informal people and we know famous people by single names - Obama, Prince, Ringo, W). To the left of his photo is the rest of the lead story headline: Clooney Finally Talks About the Whole Mess That Is His Miserable Life.
Both media graphic cover illustrations communicate that there is more beneath the cover to the man. Just the juxtaposition of these two covers is worth an examination itself for the iteration of the idea in two different national publications with broad audience (male) reach.
I like to ponder what the art of the medium says by design but don't have time or interest to read either of these stories. As a married mom raising a son, I just am curious: what appeal does the mess of this man have, and to whom, and why? Culturally? For fun: If you put yourself on the cover, what would be the story? The title of the magazine? The graphic? Digitally you can do this creative exercise. Go mother yourself with creativity - play magazine cover editor/designer.
No, seriously, this isn't play. Our culture is undergoing a huge shift. A recent study (pdf) for marketing to men showed that 50% of men in over 13 countries surveyed felt that their role in society is unclear and 80% don't identify with advertising geared to them. So how do they understand themselves? Cultural think tank scenarioDNA was part of the study. Men don't drink beer in the lounge chair watching tv anymore. Real men... (finish the sentence).
Chris Jordan makes large statements about our culture and consumerism. One of his latest works, Barbie Dolls 2008, is an art work using 32,000 Barbie dolls, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006. This is a close-up showing how he has patterned the dolls but the larger piece shows a woman's breasts. Click to enlarge for the details.
A year ago I wrote about him in Consumption Art and I'm glad to see he is still going strong.
His Barbie Dolls is part of his work on looking at American culture through statistics of consumption. He has made works of plastic cups representing the number used in airline flights in the U.S. every six hours, plastic bottles representing the number consumed in the U.S. ever six minutes, and an artwork of a skull made from 200,000 packs of cigarettes - representative of the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months.
I wrote about Hating Barbies in one of my first posts. I like Jordan's work.
For my husband, who started playing the guitar at age 40. Happy Birthday!
James Taylor Talks About His Music...
How do we communicate? Through language using our body, eyes and voices and also the language of signs and symbols. Our world is interpreted through our sense of understanding. Our cultural and cognitive learning is via media and communications. Media is plural for medium and medium is defined as the method of communication.
After fininshing my master's in Media Studies, I've now moved on to studying folk art this year as a docent-in-training at one of the world's best collections here in Santa Fe. So I look at this art form through the specific lense of the media form of the art.
Sand, clay, rocks, paper are examples of media. If we think of media today, we think of newspapers, books and television which use the symbols of the spoken and written language and we've become so literate in our shared languages because we have mass communications that can reach huge audiences because of technical developments, many of which have only happened very recently.
One of the best places to look at Folk Art before modern literacy and mass communication took off globally in the second half of the 20th century is through the Girard Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Designer/collector Alexander Girard stipulated when he turned over his collection, displayed as he created and arranged it, that there be no written descriptions of the art featured. Most of his collection was gathered in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and the Girard Wing this year celebrates its 25th anniversary.
Before mass communciations were available through the medium of the printing press, radio or television (or today, the internet), tools of communication were needed and used differently by different groups. Much of folk art depends on communicating ideas through signs and symbols through a variety of media. Reading these communications as expressed artistically, not through the written word, involves interpretation, often done hand-in-hand with oral traditions.
Literacy is how we define cultural learning and how societies are unified. Literacy lives and dies with cultures. Oral languages are disappearing at an alarming rate and Mandarin and English and Spanish are the most widely understood mass languages today. Folk art is understood in cultural context and mass communications on a global context is new, changing us and our traditions and our world and perhaps destroying folk traditions in the process.
Logographic writing systems -- like hieroglyphics, ideograms and symbols - were once the main tools of literacy. Some of the first symbols that became widespread were symbols of counting, needed for trade between groups. Roman numerals are one example of how early counting systems are still used today. The Arabic numbers, including the use of 0, came to us via trade routes between the East and West. But signs and symbols were used to communicate ideas and the Girard Collection uses many of these in various media produced by a multitude of cultures. Many ideographs have been lost to us and professionals today are trying to unlock these languages. We still don't know the meanings behind rock art and are just beginning to unlock Mayan symbols as we did very recently with Egyptian symbols.
Phonemic orthography upon which the alphabets are based allowed language to spread. Print culture, revolutionized by the Gutenberg press in the middle of the fifteenth century, brought about the cultural predominance of the visual over the aural/oral with a new system of easily reproducible communications. Moveable type made ideas available on a mass scale. Traditional folk art is based on cultural art used expressed through various media to share ideas outside of print.
Media Theory and Folk Art...
From a media theorist point of view, the visual homogenizing of the experience of print culture, and the relegation of auditory and other sensuous complexity to the background has greatly shifted and weighted our techniques of communication in the modern world. Typography creates social effects that incline us to abstain from incorporating interplay and nuance of personal communication both in our inner and external lives. Print exists by virtue of the static separation of functions of other senses and fosters a mentality of imagination and reproduction of ideas individualistically. This reduces the communal experience and personal interaction and creates a separative and compartmentalizing outlook.
One of the most notable media theorists of the late 20th century was Marshall McLuhan. The main concept of McLuhan's argument (he is famous for believing that "the medium is the message") is that new technologies (like alphabets, printing presses, and even speech itself) exert an effect on cognition, which in turn affects social organization. Print technology changes our perceptual habits ("visual homogenizing of experience"), which in turn affects social interactions ("fosters a mentality that gradually resists all but a... specialist outlook"). According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism. Tribal and communal experience is pushed to secondary status in the primacy of the individual experience of mass media.
When you consider that folk art expresses dynamic cultural traditions through media such as textiles, clay, wood carving, paper cuts, tin, wax and just about anything at hand that can be used to symbolize an idea and is shared rather than individualistically created and contained, print obliterates the interactive part of folk art tradition. McLuhan looked at the rapidly evolving media of mass communications -- radio, telegraph, print, and television, allowing communication in the 20th century from one or several to many (which can mean millions as an audience), the communication on smaller scale, one-to-one or one-to-several which is the foundation of folk art, then we begin to see how modern technology is changing cultural expression.
The Continuum of Media Evolution Effect...
In the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence": when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. He saw us moving from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's called this new social organization the global village, a term which has predominantly negative connotations.
Different media produce varying cognitive effects. Technology is amoral-- it is a tool that profoundly and significantly shapes us and the culture and self-conception of society. McLuhan believed that print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes/ decollectivizes humans by raising the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. "Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism," he wrote.
The message which the medium conveys can only be understood if the medium and the environment in which the medium is used — and which, simultaneously, it effectively creates — are analyzed together. The cognitive effects of a medium that presents ideas to a passive audience creates a lack of interaction and a dependence on this extreme form, reducing the give-and-take of communication. An examination of the medium/environment relationship can offer a critical commentary on culture and society and the form of folk art reminds us of a method of communication that predates print as the primary medium and tool of cultural communication.
Folk art carries on a tradition of cultural interpretation within a shared community. In this way, it is a two-way process using varying media, mainly without print.
We Americans are encountering a major shift in literacy. This is a photo of an Obama campaign office in Houston. The Che image next to the American flag, next to the peace symbol. What are the cultural and artistic meanings of these logographic ideagrams?
We are now a nation that reads meaning into symbols like the Anasazi and Native Americans once read rock art signs.
My son bought a t-shirt with the Che Guevera image on it when he was studying in Mexico a few years back. If you were to ask him about the man, he'd tell you of the idea. Focusing on media and political communications, I've looked at the iteration of ideas in my The Che Factor post as well as how Political Art is a Powerful Tool in our age of icons. My son, 21, thinks McCain is just old and this will will be his opportunity to vote for a president. He would pay more attention to the political news of the likes of "comedian" Stephen Colbert than any talking news head on tv and he probably couldn't tell you who Walter Cronkite was.
David Ignatius writes in the Washington Post that he and others want to know the substance behind the Obama mystery and they are struggling to understand the symbolic appeal. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who I studied back in J-School and again recently, said, "At the speed of light, policies and political parties yield place to charismatic images."
What exactly is the Obamanon phenomenon? It is a cultural thing, happening in the political sphere. It is a deep social phenomeme, picking up the steam of ideas of a yearning for unity, a yearning for change, a yearning for something to call us together to work for something we as a people can be proud of. It is the symbolic iteration of ideas to a population that doesn't read anymore (statistics such as 40% of Americans under 44 didn't read a single book last year shed light on the ephemeral appeal and Steve Jobs knows this).
Maureen Dowd caught the Che link on the semantics of Obama's verbage: (Hillary) couldn’t wait to shoplift the words “yes” and “can” from Obama’s
trademark “Yes, we can!” — (which he appropriated from Cesar Chavez) —
even though she was cagey enough to put them in separate slogans, “Yes,
we will!” and “Americans still have that can-do spirit.” I just posted Hillary Changes Her Oratory but I think she's treading water, all focused on herself.
Just like rock art that can't be interpreted anymore because the meaning is lost, what we now read is full of meaning to us as iconic images. Signs and snippets are the cultural ways we share social meaning as our literacy shifts to digital.
Related Media/Political Culture Communication Posts:
Rhetoric, from Aristotle to Obama
The Obama Poster
Presidential Campaign Logos
Word Art: Talking Points
The Che Factor
Political Art: Powerful Tools in the Icon Age
Hillary Clinton: Leading By Visual Impact
It has been a long time since something zippy and snappy came along in the area of media and political communications and that is why I paid attention to and wrote about the Obama Poster, which was as novel and original as I could remember. Today NYTimes writer Steven Heller claims Shepherd Fairey's Obama image has appeal because political graphics are usually developed by mainstream ad agencies "slavishly following old formulas" and the patriotic cliches have a "turgid redundancy" that have a "numbing rather than rousing effect." He uses two examples of political posters that I never had seen as examples of the fresh appeal that creative artists can bring to political messages: the first one by Warhol supporting McGovern (below) in 1972 and another poster artist by artist Peter Max in 1996 for Clinton/Gore. Warhol's green-gremlin Nixon put idea into art. Warhol knew popular culture and the appeal of the iconographic.
What makes Shepherd Fairey's Obama image so popular and unique in our times, though, is the viral nature of digital communications and the street art appeal/use of the poster. Fairey's Obama poster immediately sold out and he is reissuing his Obama Posters after being disappointed about finding them on ebay for personal profit. There are 600 more as of Thursday, for $30, one per household. The proceeds benefit the Obama campaign. How viral will this political art go? Can Fairey's Obama graphic be controlled and contained? Someone has even made an Obama stamp from the art. I've put in an email asking them about how they are going to release copyright permissions on the art. When I hear, I'll post.
NYTimes Campaign Stop Blog terms the Obama Poster "Social Realist inspired" - well, maybe, but Heller also misses the propaganda experience that Fairey has with phenomemes and street art. This has to do with art, culture and ideas. It is all about iteration.
Related Media/Political Culture Communication Posts:
The Art of Words: Campaign Visuals
Rhetoric, from Aristotle to Obama
The Obama Poster
Presidential Campaign Logos
Word Art: Talking Points
The Che Factor
