Print Culture Pt. 1

Print Culture and Distribution Part 1 

Marshall McLuhan - the age of print began around 1450 with Gutenburg’s printing press.

Art school traditionally only taught painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry. Interesting that originally due to institutional snobbery there was a separate where only fine art subjects was taught.

1780-1880 industrial revolution and working class and middle class, during the revolution life moved from rural to urban, things started to become mechanised in factories. Buildings and new technologies boomed. The whole fabric and nature of the country and society had completely changed. New divide fashioned out of the division between factory workers (working class) and Bourgeoisie/Middle class. Within the working class confines they started to produce their own popular culture through print works and other methods. Class solidarity emerged after consideration of why things are why they are. The working class become politicised and demand a vote. John Martin (belshazzar’s feast) didn’t work for the royals or anyone of aristocratic greatness, created a painting and did not sell it privately or to a gallery instead created an exhibition and charged admission. Changing the way that the working class can have a take on art, due to reproduction printing and engraving techniques developing over time reproductions could be made.

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold- advocate for culture should only be for the upper class, describes anarchy as the working class start to develop in a cultured world. Judgements emerge from the discourses from this type of view.

Culture Policies 'The raw and uncultivated masses' : 

"The working class... raw and half developed... long lain half hidden amidst it's poverty and squalor... now issuing from it's hiding place to assert an Englishman's heaven born privilege to do as he likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, breaking what it likes" (1960, p.105)

Leavisism- ideals that culture should only be kept to a minority of the upper class. Describes the decline of the view as a crash of the classes.

Schools of design emerge. First one opened in London and the idea spread, they were focused around the idea of churning out workers who could create vocational workers for mass design. There’s a divide between schools of design and schools of art, they don’t really understand each-other value systems and this can be linked back to the idea of snobbery surrounded in design segregated by the classes.

The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, 1936, technological reproduction art removes AURA, which embodies creativity genius enternal value tradition etc.

 Removes the idea that just an elite are there to charge the world by making art more accessible and editable to be able to adapt high concerned art to modern visual context.

Gallery’s almost show a cultic value, people keep quite and respect art; adapting behaviour as if they are worshipping something, yet when the work is taken out of the gallery context it almost lessens the importance of said art. New technologies are being used as an attack on elitist culture. Neoclassical architecture reaffirms this idea of cultic value, steps added to make you feel inferior when entering the building.

Writers and critics use words to make art seem more valuable and important than it is using.

Phillip James de Loutherbourg (edierfuskicon) – a new breed of artist showman/entrapaneur, curated a perspective set through the use of paintings, elements moved and it had room for actors to be able to incorporate a sense of personality. Was the first moving image, shows art but also about the spectacle.

The panorama- photographic realness mappings of the world from above as if the audience was a god, made from photos, print completely changing what art is and destabilising it.

Newspapers can now start using imagery inside of its publications, illustrated London news purchased for the imagery, etechs from photos, could be extracted and framed. People no longer need to go to gallaries to see art, again print changing the way art is perceived.