Art & Society

Art does not happen in a vacuum. There is always a particular social milieu in which art is produced. Each culture has a distinct social organization of artistic activities that is associated with a specific attitude of artists toward their work (for example French Cubism happens in a different socio-political climate than Russian Constructivism). Artistic cultures arise from artists' relationships with other artists, their audiences; from their involvements with cultural systems not specifically artistic, from artists' technologies and ideologies. A change in any of these variables (no matter how small) can modify a given culture and give rise to new variants of it (as per the difference between Cubism and Italian Futurism).

The professional artist chooses what to make (she produces in order to sell). She is a specialist, competent in the techniques of her craft. In the visual arts, the professional artist works in her own studio, at times of her own choice. In the artistic profession, is not the ownership of the means of production that matters so much as the artist's sense that she rules upon her personal aesthetic sense. This is the predominant image of the artist in modern Western societies.

Totalitarian regimes provide the best examples of what happens when a modern artistic enterprise is subordinated to a political ideology. Artists are forced back into sort of clerical roles, with the difference that the ideology is imposed on them. Even when it does correspond with their ideological views, it conflicts with the conception of the professional role that they regard as their primary orientation within the sphere of art (as Maikovsky's disenchantment with the Bolshevik Revolution). Above, an example of the so-called Socialist Realism.

More recently, a third avant-garde has emerged: The anti-artistic avant-garde, which is alienated from the very notion of art and its practice as it's received in other versions of the avant-garde culture. Art itself and its academic extension, is perceived as "oppressive" and "exploitative," and the obligation of the artist (and of the art critic) is seen as the promotion of the "end of art". The very coherence of art is felt to be an imposition of an arbitrary system on the immediacy of "aesthetic experiences," which are to be pursued with a self-conscious repudiation of any deliberate control.

Political avant-garde culture: The artist sees himself/herself as alienated from "oppressive" and "exploitative" political and economic institutions and tries to create a new kind of art intended to undermine these institutions (German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht is an example). The bohemian and the political avant-garde overlap, and over time, one may change into the other.

Bohemian avant-garde culture: One of the distinguishable types of this artistic culture is the bohemian avant-garde, which tends to be alienated from all rational and utilitarian aspects of social organization and cultural tradition and aims to create a new kind of exaggeratedly irrational art and, perhaps even more important, an irrational style of life. (Typical of this group is the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire.) Its behaviour centres on the ambivalent and the self-consciously paradoxical: a tradition of pursuit of the new, the cultivation of a pleasureless hedonism, the development of systems for the liberation of spontaneity.

Artist as "genius": As conjunction of the artisan, clerical, and courtly cultures, the cult of genius emerged in the early 16th-Century during the High Renaissance and became fully developed in the age of Romanticism -at the beginning of the 19th century. The artist conceives himself as the "unacknowledged legislator of the world" (in the words of the English poet Percy Shelley), an autonomous, godlike creator of new orders of reality obedient only to his perceptions and the categories of his mind. He creates the unifying symbols of a developing civilization. Historically, the "genius" is the precursor of the professional artist of the 20th-Century. Artists like Raphael, Michelangelo, Mozart, Byron, Beethoven, Delacroix, etc, are notable examples.

The courtly artist is a craftsman of ordinary social standing, directly dependent upon a secular royal court -or a household of the high nobility. He is usually socially involved with this household as a vassal, royal favorite, or court artist. He produces for the high aristocracy for which he works, without actually being a member of it. The artist is ennobled by his art, permeated with "noble" attitudes: heroic exaltation, fashionable late-medieval despair, or refined Rococo or Rajput sensuousness. Artists like Rubens, Velazquez, Goya, David, are salient examples.

The clerical artist is very much a craftsman, subordinated to a moral community, which he is committed to serve and to defend by his work. By his association with this tradition, the artist gains in prestige, but also acquires a moral responsibility which the pure craftsman is not bound by. The clerical artist belongs to a moral community, which provides him with criteria for judging which works of art are worth making. He is submissive to the discipline of the moral community of which he is a part. Boticelli, Raphael, El Greco, Zurbaran, are examples of artists in the service of the church.

The artisan is a member of a specialized collectivity, such as a guild or a workshop set up by a state or a church -who works on order and for pay only. Such artist develops the pride of good craftsmanship and habits of regularity and reliability in his work and does whatever style or content is required by the client.

Folk artists are nonspecialized members of their community and closely involved with all of its activities. Their art has symbolic elements which define and give shape to the community. The themes are linked with folktales, abstract stylization (geometric ornamentation of utensils). This artist lives more powerfully in her imagination than the rest of the group. She creates by following traditional patterns. Much art is produced spontaneously for oneself, or in friendship or for communal enjoyment, rather than for pay.