vcunewmedia:
So far most of the work we have watched in class have come from the Fine Art world. This type of work may still be very new and foreign for you. My questions comes with a qualification this week.
1. What separates Fine Art and Commercial Art…. especially within moving image work?(qualification: Don’t go into “One is boring and one is interesting.” Let’s consider that you need to see enough of something before you can really judge that. What if a “knee-jerk” response is not enough?)
2. Where and when and how do these two types of work meet up?
These are pretty interesting questions. There is a certain type of Fine Artist who shuns, strays away from, and even rejects the predictable, master/slave machine of the Commercial Art world. Likewise, there are a number of Commercial Artists who never have and never will understand the dimension of renegade crackpot “artsy” artists who seem to have no practical purpose, rhyme or reason to do whatever it is they do. Further still, there are undoubtedly Commercial Artists who don’t even realize that they are artists at all.
When I think of the term “commercial art,” immediately my mind is filled with images of comic books and television cartoons, but sometimes those fantastic ideals are pushed aside by dystopian visions of Camel cigarette boxes and toothpaste advertising billboards. Landing an art job is like being a porn star: you don’t always get to choose who’s fucking you, but in the end it’s money in the bank and you’ll do whatever it takes to not have to go back to bartending.
The line between art and commercialism is often blurred by those who seek to replicate, parody or skew perspectives of capitalist ideals in their work. Artists like Warhol, who, instead of designing a soup can label for a major company, took the design of a soup can label from a major company and threw it on a canvas. Of course, when a Fine Artist rips from commercialism, it’s clever; when an automobile company buys the rights to play Revoluion 9 during their latest SUV advertisement not only is it tacky, it’s a clear sign that they’ve run out of songs to suck the life out of.
Distinctions between what is commercial art and what is simply art for art’s sake — and what is both — are sometimes easier to make when it comes to kinetic imaging, but it really depends on how you see it. YouTube videos of Pat Condell advertising his views by blasting the cannon of atheism with religious fervor are not exactly overtly artistic, but one could easily argue that it takes talent to make people smile and that the real art of Condell lies in his knack for the seethingly comical. Then, of course, there are the hundreds if not thousands of oddball flash animations circulating on the internet that mix off-the-wall images with-off-the-wall music which neither make statements nor profit and which one would be hard pressed to define as anything other than simply “art.” On the other end of the spectrum, while it would be difficult to classify the Beatles-raping car commercial as “fine” art, studio-funded, Academy Award winning films that go down in the annals of history just happen to also bring in millions of dollars in revenue.
On a fundamental level, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the finest art has been and will always be tied to money, that it has always been the funding of the aristocracies and the finances of the wealthy which have supported it through the centuries, but when it really boils down to it, if you make art and anybody sees it other than you, you’re undeniably a commercial artist. Even if your abstract oil paintings of transexual anthropomorphic cubes don’t have a price tag next to them, you are at the very least selling an idea — at the price of attention.
