Alexandra Giroux

What is culture?

In the case of culture, language is still blurring the relation to concept. Studying the different meanings of “culture” in English, German and French, gives some clues to reach its meaning. The largest one is the English sense, anthropological, which includes the works and ways of living, style and knowledge. The German meaning is closer to the idea of civilization. The French sense, more limited, refers to the idea of creation of works of heritage, and the existence of criteria that can distinguish, in what is produced and traded, which is the culture. To sum-up, “culture” can be defined as follow: it is a “learned behavior of people, which includes their belief systems and languages, their social relationships, their institutions and organizations, and their material goods – food, clothing, buildings, tools, and machines”.
Culture is the glue that holds a society which enables people to live together, and this is reflected by the values and ways of behaving and thinking. The culture is built in a society throughout history and contacts with other cultures, it is not immutable, even if the changes are often relatively slow. Culture governs every aspect of our lives and, like most people, we are not really aware of the whole process. Indeed, the cultural products that we perceive with our five senses are only the manifestations of what culture really means – what we think and feel. This is the visible part of the iceberg. Culture is taught, learned and shared – there is not a culture for everyone. The significance is attributed to the behavior, words and objects, and that meaning is arbitrary objectively and subjectively logical and rational. A house, for example, is a physical structure, a family concept or a moral reference point, according to the distinct culture.
Culture is vital because it allows those who share a similar one to communicate with each other without having to discuss the meaning of things at all times. The culture is acquired and forgotten, too, despite its importance, we are generally unaware of its influence on how we perceive the world and how we interact in it. Culture is important because when we work with others, it is both a remedy and an obstacle in our ability to work with others and understand them.

What is your criterion for deciding this is art?

The ten following points are my criterion for deciding this is art:
1. Presentation vs. representation
The invention of photography during the nineteenth century has challenged the representation of reality: artist has tended to focus more on presentation than representation. Does art has lost its aura, like Benjamin believes? Probably no. “Concomitant with the fetishization of painting in the cult of peinture is a fetishization of the perceptual experience of the work as auratic.” (Buchloh, 1981, p.67). I appreciate a lot conceptual art but some people are not sensitive to that. Others are not enough prepared. They do not have the prerequisite for experiencing art called “psychical distance” by Bullough (Freeland, 2001, p.16).
2. Emotion
In the film Pierrot le fou, by Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuhler says that he believes that Cinema is Emotion. More globally, I think that Art is Emotion as well. I love to experience different emotions, to be surprised. Pollock’s for instance is path breaking and it reshapes our perception. Art communicates feelings and emotions, sometimes ideas as well.
3. Object of contemplation
Because they have been accepted in museums, and because some people are watching them, Warrol’s Brillo boxes can be considered as art. But art does not necessarily have to be in a museum: installation and performance are ephemera and not packaged for sale. It rejects the gallery system. Cristo’s artwork cannot be seen in museums except and picture and it cannot be sold. Situationism International aimed as well to overthrow elites and intellectuals.
4. Institutionalization
“Rather than being an external and merely supplementary apparatus which shows work and meanings for work made elsewhere, the museum is held to be an important, shaping institution in its own right, capable of exerting pressures and determining choices made by artists, critics and historians” (Francis and Harris, 1992, p.172). “Hume emphasized education and experience: men of taste acquire certain abilities that lead to agreement about which authors and artworks are the best” (Freeland, 2001, p.9). They set a standard of taste. Danto deals about institutional theory of art, according to which art is any artifact “which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain institution (the art world)” (Freeland, 2001, p.55). Commodification of art and hyperreality have been criticized by people like Baudrillard.
5. Manifestation of culture
Art has taken different forms through time and space. Japanese people consider for instance gardens as a living art form. For Dewey, art is “the expression of the life of a community” (Freeland, 2001, p.64). The cultural context is important for me in order to get deeper into the artwork and to enhance my own experience. For instance, when I saw the work of  Abedini for the first time, I thought that the arabic calligraphy was quite aesthetic but I had no idea about the meaning of what was written. Now, I understand that the artist wrote some prayers on body shapes in order to spiritually protect them. But we should be careful with the cultural approach since a colonialist approach would not be appropriate. This was subject to debate in France when the “Musée des arts premiers”, displaying “ethnic artworks” opened its doors a few years earlier. It is a way as well to promote and enhance the image of a country and it might not be a hazard if national museums are free in Great-Britain.
6. Creation of a human being
I think that art needs consciousness so human beings are the only species who can create it. Of course it can be a collective. We can think about Fluxus or even people taking part in a tea ceremony. Through art, human beings reach different goals. Bourdieu used to say that “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (Freeland, 2001, p.94). Art is linked to educational capital and some tastes are qualified as low and kitsch.
7. A language
Sometimes, there is a message in a piece of art. For instance Piss Christ by Serrano shows how our contemporary culture is commercializing and cheapening Christianity and its icons. Danto thinks that “nothing is an artwork without an interpretation that constitutes it as such” (Freeland, 2001, p.57). Through a physical medium, thoughts or feelings are communicated. The Guerrilla Girls’ work conveys for instance an interesting message.
8. The sublimation of an energy
Freud would talk about “sublimation”, “a gratification that substitutes for the actual satisfaction of our biologically given desires” (Freeland, 2001, p.157). There is a cathartic dimension in watching some pieces of art as well.
9. Trace of the past
“The aesthetic attraction of these eclectic paintings practices originates in a nostalgia for the moment in the past when the painting modes to which they refer had historical authenticity.” (Buchloh, 1981, p.67) Art is often a copy, this is the imitation theory elaborated by Greeks: art is an imitation of nature or of human life in action. Plato describes very well this “mimesis”, requiring a “techne”, even if his purpose is to criticize those “copies of Ideas”  (cf. the cave’s allegory).
10. Testimony of time and space
Art often ends up in a museum which is a keeper. Holmes (quoted in Edwards, 2007, 88) described photography as a “mirror with a memory”. The benefits for the future are not negligible. The fixed picture is a testimony of the past, a frozen reflexion in time, which establishes connection across time and space. But photography, instead of Greek statues, is perishable. Chemical photography grows old with time. Digital photography is not more reliable: we need a computer with a specific device if we want to read a picture stored on a floppy disk.

What is art?

Recently, in France, the descendant of King Louis XIV who attempted to close the Jeff Koons exhibition at the Palace of Versailles has lost his court case. One of his argument was that Koons’ work was not art. But what is art? Some scientists have tried to rationalize art, stating that art aims at beauty but obvious counter examples are evidence that this is not true (Freeland, 2001, p.172). Anderson conveys to art a culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium. For Dewey, art is expressions of the life of the community. Irwin commented a bit cynically that art “has come to mean so many things that it does not mean anything anymore” (Freeland, 2001, p.206).
For the Greeks like Aristotle, it was an imitation of theory. Some Greek statues are overwhelming and it is terrible to realize that we have lost the skill allowing to produce such pieces of art. The medieval aesthetics focused ton the glory and the worship of God. Before, everything was work and religion. The idea was that the more people would pray, the better art will be. When people were entering churches it was so impressive that they had the sensation to enter heaven. During the 18th century, philosophers like Kant linked art to ratio (reason). For Kant, we put qualities on things. Notions such as time, space or beauty would all be in out own brain. The 20th century was the opportunity for Warhol and Danto to theorize about institutional theory and commercial art. Sometimes, when people visit the Louvre, they spent only a few seconds in front of paintings that have been realized on really big periods, sometimes several years.  “By designating and consecrating certain works of art or certain places (the museum as well as the church) as worthy of being visited, the authorities invested with the power to impose a cultural arbitrary, in other words, in this specific case, a certain demarcation between what is worthy or unworthy of admiration, love or reverence, can determine the level of visiting of which these works will seem intrinsically, or rather, naturally worthy of admiration an enjoyment” (Bourdieu, 1969, p.109). An innate taste is a myth according to Bourdieu, whereas Kant has a different opinion.
This historical review is a starting point to wonder what art is today. Hughes (1980, p.89) states that thanks to modernism, “art (its creators hopes) would be open to everyone instead of a few initiated souls; and the old class distinction between artist and artisan, architect and engineer, would be merged in a general conception of art as production”. But now, with the institutionalization of modern art, only the elite have access to it. On the contrary, Harrison (1997, p.14) thinks that “modernism may fruitfully be thought of as a form of tradition, but one maintained in a kind of critical tension with the wider surrounding culture.” Fluxus, with Carolee Schneemann or Yoko Ono, included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility as witnesses Cage when he performs the silent play 4′33.
In our post-modern society, it can be asked what the meaning of what we see in the Medias is and if even it means anything. Strinati (1995, p.225) states that “there are no longer any agreed and inviolable criteria which can serve to differentiate art from popular culture.” The distinction between high culture and low culture is complicated. It is more complex than literature, painting and sculpture versus popular music, tattoo art and pornography. Although Jean-Louis Costes, performer artist, plays with his urine, feces and sperm on stage, he is recognized to be “an artist” by the profession and he is invited all over the world. The post-modern pieces of art use intertextuality and the frontier between high and low tends to disappear. Exhibitions in the streets, happenings, art in situ are evidence that it is harder and harder to consider that a work belongs to this or that category. If an extract of a symphony is used in an advertisement, this tune will be tarnished and although it used to be considered as related to high culture, the masterpiece will probably loss a bit of its symbolical value.
According to Benjamin (1932), art and more specifically photography has been corrupted and ruined by generations. Before photography, the only means to reproduce nature was painting, unique artworks done by artists. Most of the time, the aim of theses paintings were to reproduce the reality, that is why some of them have used photography to achieve their goals much more easily. With the arrival of photography as a new medium, art was redefined because photography is not usurpation or a copy of painting. During the last few years, new forms of art have become more and more conceptual. But the danger is that art would become nothing more than ideas, signs, allusions or concepts. Baudrillard (1997, p.16) defends art, instead of the idea of art: “The bottle rack of Duchamp is an idea; the Campbell’s box by Warhol in an idea; Yves Klein selling air for a blank cheque in a gallery, this is an idea”. But the images, whatever they are, are neither the truth, nor the reality, as the story of Plato’s cave shows: shadows on a wall are not real. Karl Feuerbach states in The Essence of Christianity (1843, quoted in Sontag, 1979) that today, we prefer the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being.

What is beauty?

Beauty is relative but like each of us, it is absolute for me, because of my decisions, all the time. The definition of beauty is not stable but I can say that I find beautiful my little niece, Scheveningen beach or Anna Karina’s songs. Sartwell, by translating the word “beauty” in different languages; helps us to catch the deep meaning of this world. In English, beauty is the object of longing, in Hebrew yapha means glow, bloom, in Sansrkit, sundura means whole, holy, in Greek to kalon means idea, ideal, in Japanese wabi-sabi means humility and imperfection, in Najavo, hozho means health and harmony.“The term ‘aesthetics’ derives from the Greek word for sensation or perception, aisthetis” (Freeland, 2001, p.8).
Kant aimed to show that “good judgements in aesthetics are grounded in features of artwork” (Freeland, 2001, p.10) but things are not that easy since there are some disagreements of taste. In France, we say “des goûts et des couleurs, on ne discute pas” (one cannot argue about tastes or colors). So is it possible to believe that beauty is universal and grounded in the real world? According to Kant, beauty could be recognized as having “a purposiveness without a purpose” (Freeland, 2001, p.11). The viewer has to be disinterested and his judgement should be achieved without any purpose of pleasurable sensations such as desire for instance. Kant thought as well that creating something beautiful was achievable by geniuses. He did not believe in God’s power toward beauty. For Kant, “genius” is invoked to label the mysterious quality in an artist that enabled him to create work with beauty.
Medieval philosophers were focused on God when they were talking about beauty. “Aquinas theorized that Beauty was an essential or transcendental propriety of God” (Freeland, 2001, p.38). A cathedral was thus considered as beautiful, because of its proportions, light and allegory. There was even a kind of rationalization of beauty, a mathematical approach of proportions and Freeland reminds the reader that Pythagoras is depicted in Chartres’ sculptures.
Richard Anderson, ethno-aesthetician, argues that there is a universality in Beauty, following Kant: “certain things are appreciated for their beauty, sensuous form, and skill of creation, and are treasured even in non utilitarian setting” (Freeland, 2001, p.77). One step further, he thus even states that art would be universal.
But one should not forget the feminist critic of beauty. “Canons are described as ‘ideologies’ or belief systems that falsely pretend to objectivity when they actually reflect power and dominance relations (in this case, the power relations of patriarchy)” (Freeland, 2001, p.133).

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