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Everything About Art Explained:

The Popularity of Art

by Chris Sunami

The old saw, “there’s no accounting for tastes” is untrue, but necessitates explanation. If art serves a purpose, and can be determinably better or worse at serving that purpose, then why is there such variation in what people like, and such disagreement over the relative quality of works of art?

The first answer to this question is that the popularity of art is a function not only of the quality of art, but also of its relevance. If all art posits solutions to generalized problems, then the art that we gravitate towards most often is the art that examines questions of personal relevance, which we can view as a measure of how closely the tensions in an artwork match the tensions the audience member is experiencing in everyday life.

As simple as this seems, several factors make it more complex. First of all, relevance can be simple and direct, as in a love song (which is directly relevant to someone in love), but it can also be harder to discern, as in the relationship between Pachelbel’s Canon and the problems of personal identity, or more abstract, as in the almost purely mathematical problems solved by much of the work of Bach. Relevance can also be highly individual, which explains why two people raised in the same household might have divergent tastes (because, for example, accidents of sibling dynamics have made different issues important in their lives), but it can also be group-referenced, which explains why a whole group of people often fall in love with the same work of art at the same time. Such artworks respond to the particular problems of a given time and a place. Such artworks will have widespread popularity during their location and era because they address the tensions felt by everyone during that time.

This brings up the fact that relevance changes over time. Some songs have a perennial popularity among adolescents, while others are accessible only to mature adults. Similarly, the technology boom of the eighties and nineties, and the consequent widespread sensation of Tension felt by human beings in relationship to that technology led directly to the popularity of techno music, an artform that united the electronic bleeps and mechanical rhythms of technology with the distinctly human phenomena of dance music. Although it seemed current and relevant during that slice of time, much of that era's music sounds dated now that our society’s relationship with technology has evolved.

A final complication in the issue of relevance is that it relates not only to the nature of the problem being considered, but also to the (perceived) validity of the solution. An artwork that solves its problem in a manner that is unacceptable (or that appears forced or unworkable) is likely to present as particularly distasteful to someone for whom the problem is personally relevant.

This quality of relevance also goes a long way towards explaining why we find it so important that others like and appreciate the same art as we do. The mutual admiration of a work of art signals that similar problems are relevant in the life of the other person, and furthermore, that he or she is open to solving those problems in the same sorts of ways. This advertisement, however, can be misleading, since the greater the acclaim of a work of art, the more likely it is to be interpreted in disparate (but valid) ways by different audience members. In other words, the fact that you and I both like the Mona Lisa or the song Yesterday may tell you little or nothing about either of us. This is why many devotees of indie art claim that the true mark of sympathetic souls is the mutual admiration of works of extreme obscurity and difficulty.

It is important here to note that all art exists only in the mid-ground of relevance. An artwork that is irrelevant to everyone will present as incomprehensible, or as devoid of artistic qualities, while an artwork with complete and stable relevance will not have the universality of real art.

Although questions of relevance explain a great deal of the vagaries of taste, there is another factor which is no less important: that being the fact that art is intrinsically a perceptual experience. Thus when we speak of an artwork, we really mean the experience generated by the related art object, although we have a tendency to conflate that with the object itself. To attribute artistic qualities to an object, however, is merely a shorthand way of describing qualities of the typical art experience generated by that object within members of the expected audience.

The artistic qualities of an art experience are, of course, related to the material qualities of the art object that generates them (where material qualities can include things such as sound waves, colors, rhythms and so forth), but they are not identical with them; and while many art objects consistently create similar art experiences in a diverse audience, many others do not. The reasons for this largely relate to qualities we might call idiom, genre and artifice.

Idiom
Every artwork speaks in its own language. For the art object to successfully create the artistic experience, therefore, the audience must be able to understand the language in which the artwork communicates.

Some such idioms are transparent, as in Realism in paintings, where the pattern of paint is a direct visual representation of the scene or object depicted; others are more stylized and abstract or iconic, such as the jagged human figures in a Cubist painting. Some idioms are self-presenting, such as the repeating figures in a Bach fugue; others are more difficult to discern, such as the repeating figures in a twelve-tone composition.

In addition, while many art objects, such as those in the immediately preceding examples, are largely self-contained, there are others where the context of the art object is itself a contributing element of the art experience. One case of this is Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal displayed in an art gallery, this was perceivable as art only in the context of the gallery, and even then only to someone familiar with the context and conventions of the contemporary artworld.

A different, but related form of context-dependence is reliance on allusions, which are direct references to elements not contained within the artwork itself, such as current events, other artworks, cultural presuppositions, and the like. They presuppose either the actual presence of the element referred to, or a significant familiarity with the same. Allusions are the least stable element in most artworks, and use of them can cause a artwork to quickly seem “dated”. A good example is this hip-hop song which references singers “Marvin Gaye,” “Luther Vandross,” “Anita,” and others, thus requiring the audience member to be familiar with all those other artists in order to appreciate the meaning of the lyrics.
Genre
If every artwork speaks a language, then a genre is a shared dialect between artworks, in possession of a vocabulary of conventions and formalisms which together open a space in which the art experience can be constructed.

In some sense, a genre is a generalized artwork itself, with its individual examples serving as variations on a theme. In another sense, however, the genre is the carrier wave upon which the signal rides. When one first encounters an unfamiliar genre, the tendency is to notice and respond primarily to the genre elements themselves. As familiarity with the genre grows, however, those fade into the background, and the divergences from the genre are what stand out as the figure against the ground. For example, someone who reads his or her first detective novel may be attracted at first by the pleasures of the genre conventions: the puzzles posed by the central mystery, the thrill of the chase, the satisfaction of the conclusion. Someone on his or her hundredth detective novel, however, is more likely to notice the atypical narrator, the usually sympathetic villain or the genuinely unexpected plot twist. Because genre plays such a strong role in how a work is perceived, genre familiarity is an important factor in perceiving an artwork as the artist intended. Mastery of genre is a key skill for an artist, precisely because the familiarity of the genre translates between the unique idiom of the individual artwork and the shared language of popular culture. A work that is sui generis demands a greater effort by the audience, who must then strive to comprehend its idiom without assistance.
Artifice
Most artworks depends to some extent on artifice, and the creation of illusions, which are are elements that are perceived as present, without actually being present.

A trompe l’oeil painting fools the eye, while a piece of classical music may contain ghostly notes suggested by the interplay of harmony, yet not aurally present in reality. At its best, the use of artifice serves to orient the audience towards a higher level of Truth than can be achieved with the tools of ordinary reality. In lesser art, however, the use of artifice can be deployed as a cheap substitute for more substantive elements. Because of this, a highly artificial or theatrical artwork can be perceived quite differently by different audiences. Some people will be taken in more easily by the illusions, or will display a greater willingness to suspend disbelief. Others may find their enjoyment destroyed if the artifice is discovered or revealed. In addition, the use of illusion is an exploitation of a particular way of perception, and those are subject to change. Thus, cultural and generational differences may make it difficult or even impossible for the wrong audience to even perceive the intended illusion. For example, the use of perspective in paintings is widespread in Western art, but is unconvincing to members of some cultures.

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Everything About Art Explained:

The Popularity of Art

by Chris Sunami

Idiom

Genre

Artifice