Tuesday, 4 March 2014

Reading 'Art into Pop'

by Simon Firth and Howard Horne (written in 1987)

Interesting Points...
  • Significant number of British pop musicians from the 1960s onward went to art schools
  • Post-war pop mainly African-american sounds
  • British musicians added style, image, self-conciousness
  • Sociological accounts of capitalist society generally separate high art and mass culture
  • Art schools crossed this boundary - petit-bourgeois who incorporate high art skills and identities to a mass cultural form
  • In the division in art is the assumption that high art has meaning incorporated in it by the artist while mass culture has a function eg to make money, maintain the social order
  • Mass culture perhaps is positive in its use rather than its meaning
  • Apparently in Dick Hebdige's Subculture he claims popular culture is art because of its concept of style
  • The star system works by making musicians responsible for their own sounds - myth of individual production is why critics often dismiss star's importance
  • Notion of 'art' is constructed an maintained in social practice
  • A lot of wrok goes into maintaining arts autonomy
Postmodernism
  • Sense of a breakdown between cultural catergories

No comments:

Post a Comment