I was perusing the Drawn blog today, as I often do, and came across an article talking about the plight of Animation & Illustration students at San José State University in the US. Apparently their program is suffering – compared to the rest of the Arts faculty, A/I has a worse student-to-teacher ratio, smaller physical space allotment, higher GPA requirements, and no clout in the Art faculty. Students are understandably upset about the evident prejudice against their program.

The article goes on to attempt to explain why this kind of prejudice against commercial art exists:

 …prejudice against commercial arts developed in the late 19th century and peaked in the 1950s, when it was used to bolster the modernist New York School elite. In recent decades, scholarly theories from institutional critique to Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to theories of popular culture have all demonstrated that the demonization of illustration was a product of mid-20th-century time and place, when thinkers such as the Frankfurt School marxists decried commercialism in art and culture following the devastation wreaked by Nazi propagandists, the rise of Fordist capitalism and its dark side, the Great Depression. What adherents to the “culture critique” overlook is that the so-called non-commercial arts are just as commercialized as illustration, and in far more insidious ways, being an unregulated market speculated upon by the world’s wealthiest seeking tax shelters.
– Drawn Blog, Illustrative Art Discriminated Against… Again

Food for thought.

It does often seem to me that “lowbrow” art and commercial illustration are seen as less important than Fine Art (at least within the Fine Art world), but many people I’ve talked to seem to feel that Fine Art is out of touch with society at large.  I suspect that to some extent the Modernist drive towards separating the concerns of art from popular culture is responsible.  As Fine Art moves further away from traditions of representation and media usage & toward the realm of largely theoretical concerns, it’s not hard to see why your average citizen is pretty much uninterested in how things went at the last Venice Biennale. I have a Fine Art education; I can and do appreciate Fine Art but see the alt-art/lowbrow art scene’s emergence as a much more vital cultural force, at least in terms of its impact on contemporary society.

As we see fewer and fewer primary and secondary schools with decent art programs (or in many cases, any art programs at all) and universities shifting focus to programs that have more financial value than the apparently old-fashioned notion of knowledge and learning being their own reward, art in general is becoming very marginalized. At first glance it seems more than a bit horrifying to me that basic art history and art appreciation are becoming esoteric knowledge for the majority of students going through their basic education – it’s as if somebody randomly decided kids didn’t need to read fiction any more.

At the same time, maybe thinking that the general population should  be capable of art appreciation and have a knowledge of art history really is an old-fashioned idea that was a cultural anomaly limited to the late 19th and early 20th century. Before modernism people didn’t really need art appreciation lessons, as art was basically portraiture or religious art – which people related to in very different terms than strolling down to MoMA to check out some paintings from the 1940’s.  Maybe art appreciation is only really necessary to comprehend modernism, which is pretty much dead in the water in terms of cultural relevance as it succeeded in removing Fine Art from such plebian concerns as mass-cultural contexts. I think the main reason people aren’t interested in Fine Art is that it’s intimidating – and in many ways, that’s intentional – you need to be trained to understand it. It gets even more complicated when you throw postmodernism into the mix – in essence, it’s Fine Art riffing off of mass culture. So now you can enjoy commercial-looking art but only within a specific theoretical framework, kind of like a hipster ironically wearing a hat he doesn’t like.

If that’s true, then illustration, animation, and alt-art have taken the place that Fine Art once held within society’s sense of culturally relevant artifacts. I’d go so far as to say that maybe the reason Fine Art excludes other forms of artistic representation is because these forms have effectively supplanted it and threaten its cultural validity. Maybe if kids in schools were being taught how to make images instead of how to make “important” art, art would become relevant again, or at least more people would make art, and we’d see the benefits of a corresponding increase in visual literacy & love for the craft of image-making from the perspective of actually making art (lower case a intentional) instead of worrying about whether it’s the kind of art that Sotheby’s sells to billionaires.

Certainly treating the Animation & Illustration students at San José State like all the other programs within the Arts faculty wouldn’t hurt, for a start.