Print culture and distribution lecture

print culture and distribution part 1

'late age of print' term comes from theorist Marshall McLuhan beginning around 1540 with the Gutenberg press, taking the ownership of knowledge from the few and to the many. Kick starts the enlightenment, the dawn of a new civilisation.

somerset house - the sight of the first art school in the country opened in 1780, aristocratic institution, the arts at this point are really for the ruling class. art schools at this time taught the beavx arts. only men were allowed to go to these art schools and only men allowed to be life models. that was the function of art in pre modern society when people had fixed class identities

in the industrial revolution (1780-1832) production becomes mechanised, people start taking shift labour, the cities and new technologies boom. the whole nature of our society is changed, for the first time a very clear and noticeable distinction between the classes - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the workers and the owners of the means of production. for the first time in British history you get a kind of sense of your place in the world and a sense of what your class is about. because of this segregation the working classes start to commune together and create new forms of popular entertainment like the music hall and forms of art, creating their own organic culture.  it gets sneered at by the rich as low art. it doesn't just revolve around music and imagery but around an identity struggle, things like chartism starting to evolve and the working class demanding for the vote

John Martin (1820) Belshazzar's feast - rather than work for a king or a queen, John Martin put this painting on sale in a commercial exhibition and said people could pay a small amount to come and see it, this was unheard of at the time. Because of the new technologies of production and engraving he sells engravings of it and sells hundreds.

for the first time you can just be your own entrepreneurial artist, you can make money by reprinting and distributing art. People make careers as etchers and reprductionists. you get the birth of  a culture where art isn't just kept in a gallery but its everywhere, recycled by print culture.

Matthew Arnold - culture and anarchy, culture is a study of perfection, culture is about ministering the diseased spirit of our time. anarchy is a synonym for the working class rising up, thinking for themselves, demanding to vote.

you get a snobbishness emerging saying that working class culture isn't acceptable, political prejudices against the working class start to arise, they claim they're batting for the side of culture against commercialisation but really they're just trying to preserve the class interests of the working class

what we really need is an elite, an intellectual minority who can set the standard of culture - the minority cant understand

'popular culture offers addictive forms of distraction and compensation' 'this form of compensation...is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends, not to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habituation him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all' (Leavis and Thompson, 1977:100)

schools of designs start to emerge, government school of design also opened at Somerset house, after the first one opened in London they spread everywhere. They are the fathers/mothers of art schools today. Theres only three left today one of them is us (LCA) we were never actual a school of rt we started as a school of design.

two different cultures, a culture of art and a culture of design

Walter Benjamin - the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction 1936,

fine art has aura = creativity, genius, eternal value, tradition, authority, authenticity, autonomy, distance, mystery.

what happened when people can knock of the Mona Lisa and recycle and re contextualise an image? It threatens that auratic status. Art has a cult value people adapt their behaviour as if they're worshipping something it mirrors the way the upper class try to make the working class admire and bow down to them.

the battle is still being fought today between the art of the people and the art of the 'eleite'

in neoclassical architecture you often have to go up steps to access a place, its deliberate its to make you feel inferior, you are on a level below what you are about to see, you have to ascend. Art galleries constantly employ this tactic

Philip James de Loutherbourg - came up with the eidophusikon exhibition in Leicester square and charged people exhibition fees. It was a dark room and you look through a glass window, behind this are moving images being moved with string with actors behind the screen moving about in the set. Its like the first moving image piece of work, people loose their minds about this its a sensation

the panorama - set up in regents park, people started showing these panoramas created by taking photos of the city scape and putting it in the roof of this rounded building

new ways of making art are totally changing art and what art is and destabilising it. you get the popular illustrated press, newspapers being able to use images in their publications and publication developed that are led by the images not the text. Often magnificent etches, pieces of at that come to you in our living room, you don't even need to go to galleries anymore.

with the invention of photography there was no need for portrait paintings anymore, its more realistic and massively cheaper, now anyone can have a portrait not just rich people.

the name for this period is print capitalism, you get a glut f images made for profit, these markets overtake traditional fine art markets, they make a lot more money. the myth that artists are somehow outside of capitalism certaintly comes from here, from this period.

print capitalism replaces culture with popular culture, for good or for bad. Whats good about it is its not answering to any elite force. the elitists HATE it because its 'mindless' and its 'cheap'

William Morris is regarded universally now as middle class, but he emerged from this moment of print capitalism, his position is from a position of romantic anti capitalism. what he was trying to do is produce really complex and interesting craft design and mechanical design the equivalent of fine art practice and fight against the reduction of a craft worker to just a were labourer. he was actual a radical revolutionary, it wasn't just about raising the status f the crafts and the popular art, he wanted a level culture he wanted to overthrow capitalism and welcome in socialism. his work focuses on nature so much because they strive for an ideal of human and the world and nature that's beyond the grip of capitalism. He opened an idependent craft studio, a collective studio that wasn't just run by him but all the labour was shared out equally, a combined effort not an owner and a worker. sadly they could never compete with these massive factories spitting out shoddy goods and paying shoddy wages. William Morris wanted an alternative to mass production within print culture.

the making of the English working class - E P Thompson