Milo Boyd:
The battle between high and low art is one which has been raging for the near entirety of human history. Emerging from the ashes of the late stone age, Venus of Hohle Fels is the earliest undisputed art work and in its abstracted, ivory form takes a certain level of squinting and turtle neck to properly understand. Whilst its bulbous, misshapen attempt to echo the female figure may be fired more by limited tools than artistic conception, its production signalled the birth of the dichotomy between high and low art that remains open to this day.It is not beyond the heavily cartoon influenced minds of our generation to picture two small groups of cavemen, one sporting high ponies and breezy, leopard skin cardies, the other a mixture of shit and animal, converging around the Venus. Certainly challenging, the first group kind of get it, finding a quiet pleasure in the figurine’s daring contours and nod to the post-irony state of prehistoric society. The other group are less convinced and decide to hunt animals and masturbate. A dance as old as time, this is the conflict of culture in its purest form.
Fast forward 38,000 or so years and these two groups have been pushed even further apart. Built on the preposterous notion of Platonic artistic value and deeply embedded class divisions, cultural capital reached its premium in the illiterate and immobile societies of yesteryear. For the majority of Medieval Britons art was a largely unknown entity, existing predominantly in unintelligible Latin sermons and on the walls of churches. The scant few free of the feudal ties of subsistence, high art was largely synonymous with the social elite and would remain so until the liberating forces of industrialization kicked in. Find yourself in the modern Western world and the evolution of technology and comparative wealth has all but dissolved the restrictive confines of the high/low ideal. Undeniably snobbery remains and arguably the low has become lower, but with £5 student tickets to the Royal Opera House and the internet on the cards, cultural capital is there to be seized. One result of this open playing field is the “reduction” of the classically high to the classically low.
As with all cultural phenomenon, sex has played a large part in rendering high art palatable to the masses. The earliest recorded example of smut comes in book 5 of Virgil’s Aeneid in which the oiled Trojans “man the thwarts, their arms strained to the oars; straining, they await the signal, while throbbing fear and eager passion for glory drain each bounding heart.” An amount of time later and The Bible got wind of the game, tingeing some of the drier sections with a touch of blue. In Genesis 19:30-38 Lot’s daughters get him drunk in a cave and engage in the unspeakable, and in Solomon’s song her “beloved put his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.”
If the barely metaphorical qualities of old greats weren’t close enough to the literal bone then turning towards the poets and creative types of the modern day will satiate any lingering cravings for filth. The epistolary text The Perks of Being a Wallflower with a Huge Cock is one of the best known sexual re-imaginings of a critically regarded work and as well as including the line “Despite my raging hard-on”, does actually exist. Keeping it on the screen, fledgling movie makers have given the fans what they want with niche classics like Jurassic Pork, The Devil Wears Nada and Edward Penis Hands. The last film is a particularly fine example of high meeting low, the lead male Sikki Nixx doing a genuinely good job of emulating the tick ridden, endearing performance of Johnny Depp; albeit with penises instead of hands.
Away from the sexual sphere, the art world has a long history of breaking the stifling confines of the gallery and frame. Although the much documented street art movement can seem a little tired to the gift shop generation, with its near limitless scope of creativity it has challenged our very understanding of the concept as much as the pop movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s did. Rochdale native and mural painter extraordinaire Walter Kershaw is both an incredible painter and artistic trailblazer, dragging the fine art staples of impressionism and abstract onto the gritty northern streets of his home town.
As beautiful as Kershaw’s work is, and as tempting as suggesting he reclaimed art on behalf of the masses may be, the evolution of street art from territorial signatory to meticulously worked out creations would eventually have the opposite effect. What re-emerged as a fresh take on Kershaw’s formula at the turn of the millennium slipped from the political and revolutionary back into the establishment. Banksy’s perfectly on point social fury began to feel a little disingenuous following the commerical success of Wall and Piece and the sublime irony of Shepard Fairy’s consumerist comment seemed to get a little lost following the billionth Obey snapback. The brilliance of these two cannot be doubted, but what can is the elevation of a grass-roots movement to a sell-able brand through the hands of an established marketing mechanism.
Leaving vaguely anti establishment feelings and cynicism aside, the theatre world has done a good job of dropping its post Beckett reputation of dull absurdism in recent years. The Reduced Shakespeare Company re-packages the bard’s greatest hits into palatable, innuendo-ridden nuggets of GCSE fun. Over the Atlantic and the ‘Surveillance Camera Players’ have been sticking an unwavering artistic middle finger towards the perceived Big Brother state with on-street performances of 1984 especially for lonely CCTV monitors. These troupes and productions in the vein of Danny Boyle’s cinematic Frankenstein taken into account and modern theatre emerges as a near staple of the masses. Even opera, once the sole reserve of short-sighted rich women and fat English men pretending to be Scottish Lords, has become an accessible entity following the remarkable success of G4, Paul Potts and Popstar to Operastar.
The general shift of high art from the realm of the elite to the collective sphere is of course in no way complete. Art galleries are cheaper but are increasingly depleted at the hands of private collectors. Torrenting and cheap DVDs have made film widely accessible yet communicate staunchly Hollywood ideals leaving the avant garde the preserve of fanatics and independent movie club members. Regardless, the shift exists. Quantitatively and qualitatively more and better art is there for the taking and a increasing number are doing so. Worries of over saturation exist and fears of the changing nature of consumption grips movements set on preserving traditional formats and means of distribution. Regardless, the internet, loosening dress codes and the decreasing value and believability of snobbery has forced high art to embrace the masses. Whatever ones feelings towards the great unwashed, the accessibility of art can only be a positive.
Rachel Seymour:
The divide between what is typically considered to be ‘high art’ and ‘low art’ is long established. A tradition going back hundreds, even thousands of years, there was always a distinction between the fine arts of painting and sculpture, and the ‘folk arts’ of metalwork, tapestry and woodwork. Typically, any art produced by peasants or labourers was considered to be folk art, whilst the fine arts were the reserves of the educated and wealthy. For a long time, this class division was unquestioned. It was only with the rise of the industrial revolution that the uneducated masses moved from the countryside and into the city, causing them to come into close contact with the ‘high art’ that they had been denied for so long. This led to the creation of what art critic Clement Greenberg terms ‘kitsch’ – basically high art for the masses, diluted down and easy to digest.
In response to the kitsch that was slowly infiltrating the general population, the high arts sought to become even less accessible to the average person, creating the complicated and oft-misunderstood notion of the ‘avant-garde’. Practically impossible to understand without a degree in art history, the avant-garde in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on taking art away from depicting reality, and into the realms of philosophy and discovering the ‘ultimate truth’. Artists either wrote epic texts discussing the true meaning of their work, or remained resolutely silent about their aims – neither of which is useful for helping your average Joe understand the complexities of abstract art. Above all, avant-garde art sought to be seen as the polar opposite of the everyday, ‘common’ kitsch.
It was into this confusing world of high and low art that Pop Art arose in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Typified by bright colours, a strong, cartoon-like style and everyday motifs, Pop Art became renowned above all for its celebration of the banal. Andy Warhol, an artist practically synonymous with Pop Art, is best known for his depictions of Campbell’s Soup Cans and Coca-Cola bottles, both of which are easily identifiable to everyone in the Western world. This stands in sharp contrast to the work of artists who came before, such as abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, whose work is not only difficult to understand, but also almost impossible to explain. In light of all that came before it, Pop Art’s breach of the divide between high art and low art was daring, revolutionary, and previously unthinkable. Yet it paved the way for culture in all its variations as we see it now.
By taking images typically seen in advertising, newspapers and supermarkets, Pop Art made ‘high art’ accessible to all. More importantly however, it blurred the line between avant-garde and kitsch. Kitsch is typified by its method of production, usually being mass produced in order to be consumed by the general population. Pop Art took these methods of production into the realm of high art, seeking to remove all evidence of the artist’s hand from his work. Warhol did this through the use of silkscreens, and also through outsourcing much of his production to other members of his band of followers known as the Factory. Roy Lichtenstein, another prominent Pop artist working in the 1960s, achieved this effect of mass production through his iconic use of Ben-Day dots. Ben-Day dots were developed in the late nineteenth century as a method of printing a variety of colours inexpensively, and were later used in the ‘50s and ‘60s by pulp comic books – where Lichtenstein found most of his sources. Pulp comics, in contrast to the more expensive ‘glossies’, were printed on cheap wood pulp and were often filled with sensational and lurid stories. In many ways they were the very definition of low art for the masses, being seen as style over substance and easy to read. The very word ‘pulp’ suggests a substance already pre-chewed and easy to digest, with the merest modicum of thought required to understand it. Lichtenstein took sections of these pulp comics and blew them up to gigantic proportions (his best known work Whaam! is over four metres long), essentially glorifying the most everyday of objects.
This tradition of using industrial methods to produce fine art has continued into the modern day. Damien Hirst, one of the most celebrated artists of the past decade, is well known for outsourcing his production to others, in the same way that Warhol did with his work. Despite this, he is still one of the richest artists alive, with people lining up to willingly pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for a ‘Damien Hirst’ knowing full well that he hasn’t even touched it. This is perhaps due to an inherent fear within many of the super-rich that ‘high art’ and popular culture will eventually merge together completely, rendering all of their millions of pounds worth of art worthless.
Whilst this is unlikely to ever occur, it is undeniable that it is now much harder to tell the two apart from one another. And with the advent of that tricky-to-define movement, postmodernism, it has become harder still. Postmodernism revels in combining all elements of culture in unusual and unexpected ways. An example of this is DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….., which is notable primarily because it is composed entirely of samples of other records, interviews or films. Released in 1996, it received critical acclaim in the UK and reached number seventeen in the album charts. This combining of different genres and even mediums in order to create something new is a trope typical of postmodernism, and one that typifies the blurring of boundaries between different elements of culture in the age we live in.
In many ways, it hardly makes sense to distinguish between ‘high art’ and ‘low art’ anymore. The two are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to discuss one without mentioning the other. The opening sequence of Desperate Housewives referenced a multitude of artworks, from van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait to Warhol’s famous soup can, bringing high art and popular culture together. Yet what is most fascinating about culture today is the fact that many people do not even realise when an image is a copy. To many people watching Desperate Housewives, the opening sequence will just be a series of female characters going about their business. They might possibly be able to identify one style as ‘Egyptian’ or ‘Pop Art’, but many of the references will go straight over many people’s heads.
This is what is amazing (and quite possibly worrying) about culture today: the distinction between high and low art has become so blurred that it is often impossible to tell what is original and what is a copy. Yet at the end of the day, as long as new and interesting art and media are being created, does it really matter if someone else did something similar before you? Ultimately, it is beneficial for everyone that the distinction between high art and low art is waning, as all it ever really seemed to do was uphold social immobility and the class system in gneral. Art that is impossible for the average person to understand only benefits the select few who are in the position to understand it, which ultimately benefits nobody.