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How Do We Define What ‘Art’ and ‘Culture’ Are?

In this essay using examples of theories and modern examples I aim to look at how we define Art and Culture. I will look at how sometimes it isn’t all ways ourselves who define Art and Culture but sometimes we have it dictated to us from a higher power. I will also discuss how this is present in a few forms of culture i.e. Religion and in Art i.e. Photography, painting, and installations.

In art our perception of what Art is has changed over many years. In the past Art is defined a) by who did it, and b) by where it was displayed. I’ll discuss point A. If I was to go out on to the streets of Coleraine and ask a hundred people to name me a famous female artist, I would imagine a large proportion of people couldn’t answer me. The Gorilla Girls took action at the appalling numbers of female artists whose works were not being displayed in museums due to their sexuality, “Museums all over the world keep them locked up in storage, out of sight. Demand that museums show more art by women NOW!”So from a feminist point of view you had to be a male to create ‘Art’ that could be displayed in museums. Banksy is an example of an extremist in regards to the institutional theory, he goes against all the social norms and rules. By going into museums and replacing original paintings with his altered ones has gained Banksy a high reputation, some of his paintings have been hanging for weeks before people have realised. 

Point B. If Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa on the side of a chippy on the Shank hill Road, would it be as famous as it is today? I don’t think it would. Art is defined by where it is displayed. But does that mean that paintings exterior to those in galleries are not art? I believe this to be false. Art is Art no matter where it is in my view. The murals on the walls, the graffiti, and sculptures in any city are still Art in my eyes. The current exhibition in the Tate Moderns Turbine Hall is a great example of my point. The ‘Crack’ which is 167 metres long and about 3 feet deep fills the length of the Turbine Hall, but take this piece outside of the Tate modern and put it in a footpath or road, is it still art here? Idon’t think it would be, the DOE would be filling it in. Like David Humes’ idea, ‘like food agreeing with you, Art can agree with you’. He was against this idea that you have to agree with what the upper class say is Art, he defends the subjective approach towards art and the judgement of it. Judgement in art is a matter of taste and feeling, taste in Art can vary greatly between people 

Like in art, and being a Christian I looked into Christianity to see if there where any examples of a higher power or group deciding what is and isn’t religion. I found there was a group of people who decided what the rules of the religion where. The group consisted of well established and trusted Rabbis who read the bible and noticed that people can twist most verses of the bible to fit any scenario, so they became the interpreters of the bible- the “yeshiva”, they set the meanings behind each story through a series of binding and loosing. “So they convene a council (yeshiva in Hebrew) to discuss it. After hearing all sides of the issue, they decide to forbid (or should I say bind?) several things.” Binding meaning to forbid certain things and loose meant to embrace or encourage. They essentially shaped the Christian faith to what it is today.

An example of something that is seen as photographic ‘high art’ that I personally find the complete opposite is Martha Roslers “The Bowery in Two Inadequate Representational Systems”. In this piece Rosler has taken twenty four photographs and matched them with twenty four texts. The photographs are all of shop fronts and walls taken along a single street where homeless people have once been, and the texts are merely compilations of descriptive terms for absent homeless people. “Rosler combines twenty four photographs to an equal number of texts...This simple listing of names for drunkenness suggest both the signifying richness of metaphor as well as its referential poverty.”The piece I feel doesn’t deliver any striking, visually brilliant images, any person with a camera could have made this piece, it seems more like a primary school activity, ‘how many words can you think of to describe....?’ This piece I feel from a media studies point of view strikes up symbolic violence, in the idea that Rosler, by using the texts presents the idea of a  ‘vulgar them’ and a ‘civilised us/her’.  And this is similar if not, a good example of Marxism. The idea that a certain ‘upper’ class is dominant over a lower class and dictates what is and isn’t, rendering the lower class slaves to the upper class ideology. In the case of this essay they would dictate what is and isn’t Art. Continuing on the Marxist theory, and the idea of peoplebeing on different classes, “Trinny and Susanna’s’ what not to wear” is an example of both this, symbolic violence and the idea of us getting a form of pleasure from watching people getting put down on national Television.

In conclusion How do we define art and culture, should ideally be unique to each individual as they will derive different things from different works of art, or elements of culture, but while we still have class divisions dictating to others what is and isn’t this ideal cannot be achieved. We are never going to find one piece of art or culture that everyone will like/agree on, it will always be too extreme or specialist a piece of art, or a too violent or a too disruptive piece of culture.  For example if I showed a well known piece of art to a group of art students from London and to a group of people from Kenya, the ‘Londoners’ could take a completely different set of ideas, if not more, than the group of people from Kenya because of their culture and surrounding environment. The art will may mean more to the ‘Londoners’ than the people from Kenya

 http://www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/freewomenshanghai.shtml

 Bell, Rob, “Velvet Elvis”, 2005, Zondervan, Michigan.

 Sekula Allan, “Dismal science: Photo works”, 1999,  university of galleries of Illinois state University