The German philosopher Herbert Marcuse has written and thought a lot about art, philosophy, and political action. For me this is wrapped up in his argument that art was once the great refusal. That is, art named things that were absent, art broke the spell of the things that are, art was the start of a (new) world.
These are provocative and invigorating ideas. But what are we to think about these notions in today's current context where art - our daily aesthetic experience - is so thoroughly dominated by the images of advertising, public relations, and popular culture? Though each of these contain subversive possibilities, for the most part they are implicated in the massification of culture. So, how can contemporary art practices address Marcuse's suggestion that in a one-dimensional culture there is no possibility of negation, no possibility of a space for sublimated art?
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But we should not confuse art with decoration, entertainment, craft, mass communication or display. If it is not intellectually challenging, and deliberately so, then it may be pretty or persuasive but it is not art.
Well, I'm not one for making distinctions between so-called high art and low art. But to clarify a bit, the point that Marcuse makes is that if you consider the role of art, art's presence historically, it has been an aesthetico-visual one, for the most part. In this sense, what we are most confronted with visually - and our pre-dominant aesthetic experience - is the stuff of mass mediation. Therefore, it is reasonable to be concerned with the role of this 'art.' Furthermore, when you consider the case of the contemporary art world, it is a fact that many artists must make their livings by doing work as graphic designers and other less traditionally/authentically artistic endeavours, media, and so on.
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