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27 pages, 445 KB

Open AccessReview

Art Notions in the Age of (Mis)anthropic AI

by Dejan Grba

Arts 2024, 13(5), 137; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13050137 - 30 Aug 2024

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 8415

In this paper, I take the cultural effects of generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) as a context for examining a broader perspective of AI’s impact on contemporary art notions. After the introductory overview of generative AI, I summarize the distinct but often confused aspects of art notions and review the principal lines in which AI influences them: the strategic normalization of AI through art, the representation of AI art in the artworld, academia, and AI research, and the mutual permeability of art and kitsch in the digital culture. I connect these notional factors with the conceptual and ideological substrate of the computer science and AI industry, which blends the machinic agency fetishism, the equalization of computers and humans, the sociotechnical blindness, and cyberlibertarianism. The overtones of alienation, sociopathy, and misanthropy in the disparate but somehow coalescing philosophical premises, technical ideas, and political views in this substrate remain underexposed in AI studies so, in the closing discussion, I outline their manifestations in generative AI and introduce several viewpoints for a further critique of AI’s cultural zeitgeist. They add a touch of skepticism to pondering how technological trends change our understanding of art and in which directions they stir its social, economic, and political roles. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Artificial Intelligence and the Arts)

13 pages, 223 KB

Open AccessArticle

Hans Namuth’s Photographs and Film Studies of Jackson Pollock: Transforming American Postwar Avant-Garde Labor into Popular Consumer Spectacle

by Joseph Mohan

Arts 2024, 13(1), 5; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13010005 - 25 Dec 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3742

Abstract

Abstract Expressionism is often regarded as the first purely American art movement and the first to gain mass cultural recognition. Prior to the 1940s, the consideration and appreciation of abstract art belonged to a certain intellectual elite, but the intimidating complexity of Abstract Expressionism, the daring allure of its artists, and the particularities of mid-century American culture converged to transform the avant-garde into consumer spectacle. This shift represented, and was symptomatic of, a larger societal rearrangement: information and commodity superseded industrialized labor as the core of American culture. Jackson Pollock, America’s first avant-garde superstar, stood at the center of this shift, at once representing both active creative labor and the commodification of the idea of that labor. Hans Namuth’s photographs and films of Pollock placed him and his art firmly in the realm of consumable popular spectacle, underlying further connections to Hollywood film and prominent print media. This article examines how Pollock became a paradigmatic figure in the avant-garde’s proliferation into mass culture and asserts that mass culture did not simply subsume the avant-garde. Rather, the two realms engaged in a mutual construction that pushed the avant-garde across numerous social boundaries. The artistic, critical, and popular receptions that grew out of this convergence erased distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Intersection of Abstract Expressionist and Mass Visual Culture)

33 pages, 12098 KB

Open AccessArticle

Self-Betrayal or Self-Deception? The Case of Jackson Pollock

by Elizabeth L. Langhorne

Arts 2023, 12(2), 54; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12020054 - 13 Mar 2023

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 9538

Abstract

Clement Greenberg interpreted the rise of authentic modern art as a rejection of kitsch and “half-baked” religiosity and celebrated Jackson Pollock as representing what he called for. However, his presentation of Pollock as a leading modernist fails to do justice to his lifelong spiritual quest and to his desire to reach a broad public, which led him to open his art and person to the popular media of photography and film. Following Greenberg, Donald Kuspit would have us understand Pollock’s embrace of and by the public as a self-betrayal, transforming his great abstractions into decorative kitsch. Kuspit’s understanding of Pollock’s “true self”, however, cannot convince. His embrace of the public did lead Pollock to doubt his artistic enterprise: his dream of art as alchemy. But, the great abstractions testify to the power of that dream to create great art, challenging us to reconsider the relationship between authentic art and mass culture, of modernism, spirituality, and the public. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Intersection of Abstract Expressionist and Mass Visual Culture)

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32 pages, 16665 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Semiotics of Willem de Kooning’s Easter Monday

by Claude Cernuschi

Arts 2023, 12(1), 31; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12010031 - 13 Feb 2023

Viewed by 4927

Abstract

Critics have frequently employed strict binary schemes to explain Abstract Expressionism’s singular contributions to art history: the victory of abstraction over figuration, avant-garde over kitsch, pure art over anecdotal illustration, action over premeditation, or escapist detachment over direct political engagement. Taking Willem de Kooning’s Easter Monday as a case study, this paper will question the efficacy of such dyadic explanations to encapsulate the diversity of New York School practice. Easter Monday includes both figural and abstract elements, some that parade the work’s impulsive and spontaneous character and others that were created by a photo-mechanical process. Some celebrate the artist’s personal and idiosyncratic touch, others the impersonality of popular forms of advertising. In contradistinction, the semiotic terminology of C.S. Pierce reveals not only multiple points of intersection with de Kooning’s work; it also effectively identifies and differentiates the plurality of elements the artist conjoined in a single visual field, some of which qualify as iconic, indexical, symbolic, or even as hybrid combinations of the above. These more elastic descriptors, it will be argued, are well-suited to address de Kooning’s variegated surfaces: they can address his accommodation of diverse techniques, as well as the multiple ways the artist constructed meaning and responded to popular culture. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Intersection of Abstract Expressionist and Mass Visual Culture)

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12 pages, 223 KB

Open AccessArticle

On the Genealogy of Kitsch and the Critique of Ideology: A Reflection on Method

by Andrius Bielskis

Genealogy 2018, 2(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2010009 - 17 Feb 2018

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 6360

Abstract

This paper examines similarities and differences between the genealogical approach to social critique and the Marxist critique of ideology. Given the key methodological aspects of Michel Foucault’s genealogy—the fusion of power and discourse and the Nietzschean notion of the aesthetization of life—the paper argues that Hollywood kitsch maybe interpreted as a new dispositif. A key task of the genealogy of kitsch is to analyze the effects of fake Hollywood narratives: how they form and normalize us, what kind of subjectivities they produce, and what type of social relations they create. La La Land, a 2016 American musical, is discussed as a way of illustration. Theorists of the Frankfurt School also advanced their critiques of the popular culture and its forms of kitsch; yet they followed Marx and his conception of ideology. The paper concludes that the differences between genealogy and the critique of ideology are philosophical. Foucault rejected the Marxist conception of history and the notion of ideology as false consciousness. Kitsch, for a genealogist, is formative rather than repressive; it makes people pursue banal dreams. For a Marxist critic, popular culture as a form of ideology dulls our critical capacities and, therefore, leaves the status quo of alienation intact. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Beyond Foucault: Excursions in Political Genealogy)

15 pages, 130 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Ghost-Image on Metropolitan Borders—In Terms of Phantom of the Opera and 19th-Century Metropolis Paris

by Changnam Lee

Societies 2014, 4(1), 1-15; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4010001 - 27 Dec 2013

Viewed by 9369

Abstract

This paper reviews Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera in the context of the social and cultural changes of the metropolis Paris at the end of the 19th century. The Phantom of the Opera, a success in the literary world and widely proliferated in its musical and film renditions afterward, is considered and interpreted mainly in the literary and artistic tradition. In this paper, however, this work will be considered from an urban sociological perspective, especially from that of Walter Benjamin, who developed the theory of the urban culture, focusing on the dreaming collectives at the end of the 19th century. Leroux’s novel can be regarded as an exemplary social form of the collective dreams of the period expressed in arts, architectures, popular stories and films and other popular arts. Given the premise that the dream images in the novel, so-called kitsch, reflect the fears and desires of the bourgeois middle class that were pathologized in the figure of the ghost, this paper reveals the cultural, social and transnational implications of the Ghost-Image in relation to the rapidly changing borders of the 19th century metropolis. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ghost-towns: Cityscapes, Memories and Critical Theory)

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