ArtIsCompromised

Quora Answer : The art (in the various forms taken by "art") of Lady Gaga, Walton Ford, Jeff Koons, and even Banksy seem to play on similar themes. What are they? (Or what do you think they might be?)

Apr 25, 2014

All these artists live in the modern, media saturated world. Unlike the artists of the past who dealt with things like nature, "the sublime", the romantic, or "the human condition".

It's a cliche, but for the artists of the past, art was a kind of mirror held up to the rest of the world. Art was something apart from the "real world". And commenting on it from outside.

Today, we're saturated with "art" or "culture". It comes at us electronically from the second we awake to the radio alarm-clock or pick up our tablet (usually before we get out of bed in the morning.)

We hear music constantly. The streets of our cities are plastered with adverts using every aesthetic trick and style.

Our world is now made of art. Art can no longer pretend that it's is "unworldly". That it's something outside the world and able to throw fresh insight on it by offering disinterested commentary.

Instead, art is utterly compromised. It has to struggle with the fact that it's now culpable. It IS the world. It's principles are the principles by which the world now works. All art is doomed to become a commodity within our capitalist market and media-system. All artists are playing the attention game in which celebrity is just the professional league.

So, all these artists are responding to that fact. To the fact they have no privileged position outside post-modernity or the society of spectacle or however you want to term it. Koons and Gaga embrace the condition wholeheartedly and try at least to draw attention to it. Perhaps, with Koons, seek to highlight the opportunities for pleasure in it.

Banksy is more slippery. He continuously makes moves and experiments to TRY to escape. He questions the institutions of art curation (sneaking works into museums where they don't belong, maintaining his pseudonymity, and gives art away on walls where he knows he won't be able to sell them.) But even he demonstrates an ironic knowingness of the impossibility of escaping being part of, or even talking about, this media-saturated world.

Walton Ford I don't know. But I'd guess that there's an idea there that you aren't going to use some avante-garde aesthetic strategy to escape the mediocrity and banality of "mere entertainment" and achieve a more profound insight. So you might as well do popular entertainment well.