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From Popular to Pop The Arts in/of Commerce MassMedia and the New Imagery DarylChin WHEN WALTER BENJAMIN addressed the modern situation of art in the "age of mechanical reproduction," he could not have foreseen the presence of the mass media in our own time. He viewed the changes in art in relation to the aesthetic principles of high art. In the intervening decades, the entire trajectory of art has been redefined through the mass media, to such an extent that the philosophical issues inherent in aesthetic discourse have to be formulated in terms which signify this awareness. What are the distinctions inherent in such categorizations as high art, popular culture, mass media? Is there a genuine aesthetic difference, for example, between the faux-naifsurrealism of Robert Wilson and thefaux-naifsurrealism of David Lynch? The model for artistic production in our time and in our culture is that of the commercial motion picture industry. Visual artists as disparate as Jeff Koons, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, Martha Rosler, Sarah Charlesworth, and Kevin Carter implicitly or explicitly have cited the movies as a primary source of inspiration and emulation. Motion picture directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Jim Jarmusch are mentioned repeatedly as exemplary artists. Although the issue is far too complex for elucidation here, what seems certain is that the aesthetic issue of realism conjoined with the philosophical issue of authenticity to ratify the representationalism of the narrative cinema as the harbinger of realism in our time. With the advent of abstraction, the 5 issue of verisimilitude was converted into the issue of either authenticity or idealism; the development of Pop Art and Minimal Art was occasioned by the return of realism as an aesthetic criterion. In fact, prior to the adoption of Pop Art as the label for a particular art movement, one of the terms critics used to describe work by Lichtenstein, Dine, Wesselman, Grooms, and Warhol was "new realism." In the ideological precepts for Minimal Art, its purpose was to engage in an epistemological inquiry into "reality": real space as opposed to virtual space, actual volume as opposed to illusory volume, real dimensionalitv as opposed to visualized dimensionality . In the visual arts, one of the most important styles of the past decade has been that of image and text work, that is, a photographic image joined to a written text. The format is derived from advertising; in fact, it is another form of advertising, but the context of art galleries and museums makes it "art," in the sense of high art. This is the Warhol ploy, of course, played now in a supposedly politicized context: this post-conceptual sloganeering is the reductio ad absurdum of Minimal Art. The ascendancy of Pop Art and Minimal Art brought profound consequences for aesthetic development. If Pop Art sought to ratify the mass media as a source of imagery, then the conditions of the mass media could be considered as a primary influence. One of its conditions always has been serialization. But the attempt (whether consciously acknowledged or not) to graft mass media conditions onto the production of art in other areas has had deleterious effects for theory. As early as the 1960s, art critic Lawrence Alloway tried to define the idea of commodification in the commercial cinema: he stressed the idea of what he called the cycle, proposing critical standards which would take into account, not "originality," but the specificity of variation. Obviously, by now, with the prevalence of sequels in the commercial cinema, these standards have been adopted as basic critical precepts. This idea of commodification more recently has infected aesthetic theory: think ofJean Baudrillard. Rosalind Krauss's writings about the myth of originality-the fact that all imagery is "recycled" and, so, there can be no claims for originality in art-hinge on the idea of serial imagery and the constant recycling of archetypes and stock imagery. Of course, that used to be called tradition, and it used to be the way culture evolved. Theoretically , the point is not to restate the obvious, but to make the obvious obscure, especially when the obscurity accentuates the originality of the theorist, but decries the idea of...

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