"The Most Photographed Barn in America"
Within art, its function and purpose has become nebulous and vast, donning a plurality of meaning, utility and importance due to the effects of the ever-expanding category of new media. Any attempt to find a solid, meaningful position on art—in general—is frustrating and perplexing. What was once valued in art—beauty, aesthetic quality and craft—is banal and common with the availability and accessibility that reproductive and digital technologies offer. Art’s value continues to represent a powerful social force and lies within the ability to examine truth and paradigm, and to challenge conceptions of politics, identity and the superstructure of human experience we all inhabit. As technologies continue to expand and as the delineation between reality, hyperreality, and virtual reality continue to dissolve, art must continue to challenge dominate social machinations and confront the audience with its own acceptance of the confusing and confounding veil of contemporary existence in an attempt to find truth within the burgeoning unreal. Therein exists a double bind, as new media expands possibilities, it serves to limit them, as our knowledge and appreciation of art richens, it is cheapened by a blindness fostered by simultaneous breadth and narrowness of knowledge; the art world is a veritable paradox—consistently jockeying within itself to push boundaries and be limited by them.
For the sake of argument within this essay and as a clarification, any reference to society as a whole is specific to modern global mass media and the diaspora that includes—it is not meant to be a universalized generalization about all art and societies as a whole. Nonetheless, any argument of “society” is intended to be representative of the most current and dominant forms of art and media as the scholastic discourse understands it.
New media offers “the subject” an extension and expansion of the familiar but also a further muddling of the ability to relate with it. Classical conception of art has its basis in the recognition of the craft inherent within the extension of nature, “the subject” appreciates the connection to something familiar but admires its transformation into something artful (Aristotle, Dewey). However, the familiar and natural are two vastly different concepts within contemporary existence. Relatability now stems from a connection to something beyond the real, not entirely the “hyperreal” that Baudrillard espouses but still akin to it; as Freeland describes it, a reversal of the “natural” extension so that “the representation proceeds the reality and even comes to define it” (196). Society’s conception of the familiar is actually a relation to the unreal veiled as the real. Film and digital media—in specific—develop a world in which we are no longer confronted with the seams of representation. Upon viewing a photo or video of something, we attempt to claim, with a distinct hubris, to have seen that thing, when in fact, we have only seen a photo or video of it.
Compacted within all of this is the appropriation of art representation, seeing and owning photographs or ersatz versions of famous art fosters a satisfaction and belief that we have enlightened ourselves through it. The ability to represent that which is already a representation—and the compounding layers of additional representation—is admittedly pleasurable and allows for a sort curation of famous art pieces to take place on a scale that was impossible before. But it carries latent anxieties along with it. Art tourism and representations of famous pieces harken to a sort of fetishism surrounding famous works espoused by Adorno. Artists that represent a tradition of artistic knowledge or celebrity are valued because they best represent a movement, moment in time, or paragon of excellence and because of this, are featured in museums that become their own brand of celebrity due to all of the great works they encapsulate. Museums and canons collect “accepted classics [that] themselves undergo a selection that has nothing to do with quality” (Adorno 540). Canonizing and the attempted universalization of classic works cheapen the depth of thought necessary for them to be lauded as remarkable.
Within this is an emptiness of meaning and a collection of thought so nebulous but rigid that the art becomes a parody of itself. This anxiety is aptly surmised within DeLillo’s parable of the “Most Photographed Barn in America” wherein people flock to a barn, important only because of its own celebrity as the most photographed barn in America. As DeLillo’s characters state, “no one sees the barn” any longer, “we only see what the others see”. The ability to examine the barn as it exists—first and foremost—as a barn, is nullified by the “collective perception” that people project onto it (DeLillo). The beauty and significance of the barn is overshadowed by its presumed significance and beauty. Once there, people feel like they must photograph it, just like people at museums must photograph famous art pieces; they no longer choose to experience the art as art but instead as a commodity to covet, a representation of celebrity to collect as their own.
The simulacra and the fetish piece have a unique symbiosis in this regard and both are fostered by the commodification of goods, media and information. The simulacra and the fetish piece are commodities due to their ability to “alienate [themselves] from producer to consumer” (Adorno). Art has always been a commodity but not to the degree and scale it is today. Certain pieces, works and artists are held in veneration and fetishized so that Art and Artists that are truly accessible and available to everyone are discounted as lesser. Instead of procuring art from local artists we find remarkable, we seek out prints of famous pieces with the artisit’s and work’s name stamped across the bottom to announce our taste and appreciation of fineness. We seek the simulacra of art; we seek art that tells us that it is art instead of determining its value ourselves.
However, consistent with the expressed nature of this double-bind, such hyperbolic exclamations of ignorance and doom are themselves oversimplifications, as these technologies represent a great potential for upending and potentially negating the effects of commodification. Benjamin points to the power that new media holds, asserting that “for the first time…mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence upon ritual” (529). The devaluation of context and experience of art itself frees the subject from the fetishism and its “imbedded[ness] in the fabric of tradition” (529). The aura exists to reinforce the artworks importance and aura clearly still exists with art tourism, celebrity artists and famous exhibitions. However, while this all still occurs, the power of this exposure to great works is that they become commonplace and their remarkableness wanes due to social saturation and a realization that they are just paintings in museums. Removing a famous piece from the museum—through reproduction—strips it of the museum, as an institution, and through this, strips it of a facet of its mystique. The ability to speak to a new context allows “the subject” to appreciate and judge a work in a new way—removing from elitism and democratizing the meaning of the piece by speaking to the subject alone, relatively free of a ritualized context.
To Benjamin, this destruction of aura however is not as simple as de-contextualization and relies upon a re-contextualization and further dissolution of norms surrounding art. The representational reality fostered by photography is heightened by the ability to caption it, forcing a meaning and significance that a title of a painting could not (530-531). The photographer repurposes reality in a different way than the painter does, he adopts the immediately familiar, repurposes something we may have seen in everyday life and exhibits it with a caption that affects perception of the everyday and banal. With the dissolution of ritualism and aura surrounding art, we are forced to examine these representations of the everyday, quite literally, through a new lens. To Benjamin, this is an inherent good, “instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics” (529).
For Benjamin, film is the ripest medium for this political potential because of its ability to be a constant, unrelentingly politicized work or art. Aura exists on the stage but not in film, “aura is tied to [the character’s] presence, there can be no replica of it” (531). However, film forces the actor to best represent themselves (531). This argument, while muddled by the vastness of filmic art that has since permeated the modern paradigm, still points to the political potential of art and people playing themselves. If “any man can lay claim to being filmed” and if “at any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer,” then the greatly expanded category of artist allows the dissolution of bourgeois control over art’s production (533). Simply put, if art is democratized; the ability to make political statements—through art—is given to those who had limited means to make artistic, political statements before.
While no longer representing the forefront of effective political, social commentary, film was valued by Benjamin for its ability to illuminate things accepted as ordinary, to project a message that was inexorable and resound. These strengths exist in newer forms of media and art expression that broadcast them globally through the internet. Film allowed for things like slips of tongue to become noticed and meaningful to plot, innocuous gestures began to bear new meanings due to contextualization and “revealed depth in conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface” (535). Street art, art that panders to a confrontation the hyperreal, and art that addresses of social or political issues is everywhere in today’s society. Street art takes advertising, something prodigious and overwhelming at times and vulgarizes these images of consumerism and celebrity. We celebrate this new form of expression because it alerts us to how pedestrian these symbols of consumerism have become. They de-commodify the commodity and tarnish the aura of the copyright.
Yet again, the paradox of the art world plays into this, as street art becomes co-opted by the machinations of commodification. Shepard Fairey created his own clothing line and has commodified his street art into something marketable. Artists, even subversive artists want to make a comfortable place for themselves in life and these actions and desires are not necessarily bad. However, nothing is gained by an abdication to the maneuvering wiles of society; dominance of any discourse should never be conceded. Art should exist to interrupt these accepted narratives and spur insight into comfortable paradigms by making them uncomfortable. For every Shepard Fairey, someone new must begin challenging the accepted framework of society and the artworld.
Art and new forms of media exist within a double-bind, unable to ever fully upend the status-quo, it simply allows for awareness and comprehension of the absurd banalities accepted within society. As an overly simplistic and hackneyed metaphor, the artist should exist as a check-and-balance against the hegemon, so that a discourse is maintained and control is never tyrannically held by a single group, system of thought, or lens through which to perceive reality.
Works Cited:
Adorno, Theodor “On the Fetish-Character of Music and the Regression of Listening” Art and its Significance. 3rd Edition. David Ross, Stephen. New York: State University of New York, 1994. 539-547. Print.
Aritstole “Poetics”, “Nichomachean Ethics” Art and its Significance. 3rd Edition. David Ross, Stephen. New York: State University of New York, 1994. 66-76. Print.
Benjamin, Walter “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility” Art and its Significance. 3rd Edition. David Ross, Stephen. New York: State University of New York, 1994. 526-538. Print.
Freeland, Cynthia But is it Art?. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Print.
Delillo, Don “THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA: Excerpt from White Noise by Don DeLillo” Downwind Productions. WEB. 17 March 2012. http://www.downwindproductions.com/barn.html
Dewey, John “Art as Experience” Art and its Significance. 3rd Edition. David Ross, Stephen. New York: State University of New York, 1994. 204-220. Print.
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