OUGD401 - Context of Practice Lecture 6

Print Culture and Distribution – Part 1

Culture has been created around technological progression. The age of print began around 1450 when the printing press was created. The age of enlightenment where knowledge was becoming accessible to a wider audience. We are now at an extreme endpoint with access to almost any information we want.

Art institutes like the Royal Academy were only for male elitists. They taught subjects such as painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry which were all classed as ‘fine arts’. Life was fixed into classes from peasants to the aristocracy. This was the age of change where handmade was turning to mechanised (industrial revolution) and people were moving from the country to cities. This led to an industrial boom to keep up with the increase in demand. Due to a larger population, segregation between classes became rife.

1780 – 1832 Bourgeois / middle class vs working class = class war / struggle

The working class communed in areas of the cities and started to create new cultures. Chartism increased and the working class became politicised because of their unhappiness at inequality between classes.

Art becomes commercial so it is now possible to become an artist with no state help, which made way for entrepreneurs. There became as mass image culture of recycled printed media.

Matthew Arnold ‘Culture and Anarchy’

The upper classes had lost control of the working class. Led to a politically fuelled snobbism, to keep them in their place and preserve the interests of their class.

Leavisism suggests that there was a need for minority elitists in order to maintain culture.

Popular culture was said to be an ‘addictive form of distraction’.

The school of design moved into Somerset House and the Royal Academy relocated. The function of schools of design was to get people into industry.

Walter Benjamin – The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Technological reproduction of art removes creativity, authenticity, tradition genius etc which are all part of the aura of art. Without these it makes the work seem less special.

When the work is removed out of a gallery it changes the work so it has a cult value rather than it being ‘worshipped’. New technologies were being used as an attack on the arts of the elite.

Neoclassical architecture is built so you have to go up steps to access the art, means you are physically raising yourself up to its level. This is to make the art seem more important than it really is. The sublime was art that was about deep and meaningful things. This was used to belittle people because it was about concepts that working-class people weren’t supposed to understand.

The Eidophusikon was created in 1781 and it was almost like the first moving image piece. This showed entrepreneurial skills and showed that things could be done better with new technologies.

The Panorama (of London) was a painting of London from the ‘painter’s platform’ above London. This however was created from a photograph and enabled people to see London from an alternative viewpoint.

The use of new reproductive technologies change art. The Duke of York’s Column allowed art to come to the public and made it widely available. Engravings were done from photographs which meant an expert wasn’t needed to draw the images anymore. The introduction of photography meant that portrait painters weren’t needed anymore, as photography was cheaper and more realistic.

Led to the introduction of print capitalism where images were made for the purpose of profit. This was responsive to the increase in technologies and meant art was being replaced with new forms of art which were cheap and affordable. This meant culture was being replaced with popular culture.

John Ruskin’s ‘Of Kings Treasuries’ had a romantic anti-capitalist view. William Morris had similar views and wanted to make craft design compete with art. The craft worker was being reduced to the labourer. Art is the ‘fruit’ growing from society, so society needed to change. He wanted to stop capitalism and bring about equality. His works have a political meaning which is why he based a lot of his designs on nature which is seen as a perfect paradise. He set up Merton Abbey Mills which was a cooperative studio. Practitioners worked in combined effort and the craft studio was freely available. This was a microcosm of the alternative of the mass-produced world and saw a shift back to handmade techniques rather than digital.

Was this a more auratic or cooperative approach?