ART
If there’s any word guaranteed to incite rage and insecurity, surely ‘art’ is the safest bet. It’s not just a matter of what constitutes art and what does not (although that in itself is often enough to start fights in the street), but also whether a formal definition of art should exist at all, whether it’s unfair and discriminatory. If class warfare is all that ensues we feel as though we got off lightly.
I’ve been accused of elitism before and I’m quite sure it will happen again, so I’ve got nothing to lose by planting myself firmly in the camp of those who think that art really does matter, and that there are and will always be criteria for what counts as art. Let me get something straight, I’m not one of those people who’ll tell you I could have painted that myself, or that it’s not art if it’s not an oil painting of a stag standing proudly in the Scottish Highlands. But your angst-ridden monologue recorded on your webcam and uploaded to YouTube? No, sorry, that really isn’t art and you are not an artist.
I suppose my point is that the presence and importance of art in society has little if anything to do with the current trend of simply recording oneself and sharing it with the world. The common / casual misinterpretation of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the medium is the message is that the significance of TV or the Internet or other media is simply that something is, well, on TV or the Internet, and that is more important than the content itself. If that’s true then surely creating something significant is simply a matter of creating anything at all. However, as Mark Federman, formerly Chief Strategist for the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, has observed, this interpretation misunderstands what McLuhan meant both by ‘medium’ and ‘message’.
For McLuhan, media are tools, language, things that allow our bodies to transcend their physical constraints. And messages are the transformative effects that ensue – for example, we understand at first glance that steam power will produce more than horse power, but we don’t necessarily comprehend that it will usher in the industrial age, which in turn may actually be the message. Being the limited creatures that we are, rarely do we understand the significance of what we see until its consequences have been played out.
All of that’s a long way of saying that I think art is defined by its transformative power, and if it doesn’t have any then it isn’t art. Navel gazing, self-indulgence, your own personal story without meaning or context, nothing will change my mind that these things just don’t count as art.
What does all of this have to do with Orange Life? Perhaps not much, except that my interest most of all is in advocating a definition of art that is intellectual, considered, and inextricably bound up with societal change. It is of course deeply unfashionable to resist the rise of user-generated content, and the knee-jerk reaction of its unquestioning defenders is usually to play the cultural elitist card. The truth, sadly, is that an unprecedented amount of space has been created that could be filled with a democratized version of what art means, but to date it’s mostly just so much unfulfilled potential.