From Idolatry to Advertising: Visual Art and Contemporary Culture : Visual Art and Contemporary Culture

This book records the conclusions that I came to as I thought through the cultural evolution of each of the different sorts of visual art and tried to piece together their story from the perspective of philosophy. Chapter 1 discusses how culture shapes art to be what it is from the outside, like a mold shapes clay, and the great power of art to affect the way we think and to promote cultural change. Chapter 2 discusses the evolution of Fine Art from its birth in the Renaissance to its present old age and decline. Chapter 3 discusses the institutional structures that make art for popular taste its own sort of art, and the culture wars over censorship and whether public art should be Fine Art, or art for popular taste. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the life histories of design and advertising. This book is also the story of how art interacts with technology. In my work in Artificial Intelligence research I saw that there is an intimate connection between the evolution of design in engineering and design in art. In both sorts of design there is a growing understanding of how to make and use levels of packaging, and how to approach things from the functional perspective of the artifact. This is discussed in Chapter 4. My talk in Chapter 1 of how art styles affect us also reflects this functional approach. That is, instead of approaching art styles in the traditional ways, I have approached them in terms of the tasks of vision and how art delivers information packaged to be understood at different levels of visual processing. Using this functional approach, I stress what art does for us rather than what art is. I also tried to address the evolution of culture given the mass media and mass market, and the role of art in the growing marriage between television and computer. As I thought about computers in my work in Artificial Intelligence, I saw that a new sort of idolatry was arising where ^he computers were being asked to be infallible experts giving us advice on everything from taxes to marriage problems and our health. I saw that computers were being used not just as art tools and artists, but also as art objects like the ancient idols. This started me thinking about how other ancient functions of religion were being filled by advertising and the media. Ch. 1. The Cultural-niche Theory Of Art. 1. The Different Visual Arts. 2. Cultural Niches. 3. Defining Art. 4. Objective Standards For Comparing Arts. 5. The Evolution Of Visual Art -- Ch. 2. The Fine Art Cultural Niche. 1. The Birth Of Fine Art. 2. The Institutionalization Of Fine Art. 3. The Formative Ideology: Aesthetic Formalism. 4. Defining Who The Artist Is: Expression Theory. 5. Modernism And Beyond -- Ch. 3. The Popular Art Cultural Niche. 1. The Formation Of Popular Taste. 2. Confusions Between Fine Art And Popular Art. 3. The Institutions Of Popular Art. 4. Artistic Mission. 5. Appropriate Subject Matter. 6. The Powers Of Popular Art. 7. Popular Art As The Vanguard Of Culture -- Ch. 4. The Design Art Cultural Niche. 1. The Need For Design Art. 2. The Ideologies Of Craft. 3. Ideologies Of Functional Form. 4. The Birth Of Design. 5. Designing For Sales. 6. The Power Of Design. 7. Design Art As Cultural Niche -- Ch. 5. Advertising. Susan G. Josephson. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. A description of the evolution of all four major types of contemporary visual art: fine art, popular art, design, and advertising. Written and illustrated to appeal to a broad readership with interest in the visual arts, contemporary culture, and the pervasive effects of television and the computer.