"There is a difference between commercial and artistic."

"commercial" communicates "buy this" (product, process, idea.)

Come on, guys. It's a valid (if somewhat overplayed) question.

Does creating something for commercial purposes invalidate all of its aesthetic qualities? Should items produced for mainstream consumption and enjoyment be excluded from the category of things we treat as "art"? Should the mainstream and the fringe be held to different aesthetic standards and is one inherently better than the other? What about the legion of things that cross the ginormous middle ground between the "mainstream" and the "fringe"?

This is not a question that is meant to be confined to film; despite the frequency with which it pops up in those discussions, it also is omnipresent in book discussions, music discussions, painting/sculpture discussions, etc; there is this constant tension between the "real/genuine" and the "fake/artificial" axes that everyone engages with on some level but no one is willing to define. Even if you grant that it can't be usefully defined in a universal manner, surely there's a personal definition that you use when you make your aesthetic judgements; I'd like to see people use this thread to explore that.

(cue 300 posts of everyone calling each other names, ha)

Sometimes bad art (that which feels largely bereft of innovation in some way, conceptual richness or freshness and a high standard of technical execution) sells very well.

Somewhere in there is the difference between the commercial and the artistic.

This is an interesting question but it's really far too broad. Different genres of things should be held to different standards from one another, not just mainstream v not mainstream. Which does mean the answer is yes, because the things that tend to be mainstream are different from the things that tend to be fringe. Which isn't the same thing as lowering your expectations, though.

As for better than the other, I think no, one is not inherenty "better."

xpost
As for better than the other, I think no, one is not inherenty "better."
agreed.

The question, then, isn't "is there a difference?" but "what do we gain or lose (politically, socially, culturally) by preserving this difference?"

sounds good.

Not sure what you're getting at here. The distinction, as you said above, isn't aesthetic, but a matter of production and intention. Where is abstraction coming into play?

Things get tricky, though, when I say something like "art preserves and expresses certain qualities that are endangered by a society that cares only about the bottom line."

x-post Martin
abstraction, as in, we can abstract the meaning and value of art and commerce from their intended roles. we can dissasociate them from what they are intended to be by their makers, or what they appear to be at a glance. I think in a society where that kind of abstraction isn't the norm (or isn't even recognized as being valuable), it's hard/impossible to really value "art" as object, as something to be appreciated separately and distinctly from other things of great value.

Alternate question: When is art enhanced or improved somehow by being commercialised, if ever?

Even if the artist isn't trading in money, their intention for someone else to see it and react is commercial.

I guess, in the initial instance, with so much art being created largely because of financial incentive (if only potential), the commercialisation is an inherent factor and good thing. it probably wouldn't have been made otherwise due to time constraints, distractions, laziness etc.

Ah, I get it now!

"Even if the artist isn't trading in money, their intention for someone else to see it and react is commercial."

In the wider sense of "commerce," I guess, but not in the economic/market sense we've been using here. Why isn't their intention "social"?

"Reactions do not determine art. If a tree falls etc."
Yeah, but Konal, we can probably agree what a tree is pretty easily. Art, not so much. What does determine it, then?

HA, dave see this is exactly where I was going wrong with my art, when I realised that I don't have to perform for anybody else then there's a huge release of pressure from above and then my art becomes waht *I* want it to be.

ahem, sorry, back to the question.

the answer = most of the time true, when it's false though it's classic

Commercial purposes in terms of film are largely functional for the producers of the movie; for the audience, save a couple of guys hoping perhaps to get laid by taking a lady to some trash with a bunch of has-beens kissing in it, films are functionless, a pastime, and therefore gratuitous.

TV is hazier; some commercials, to certain people, might be art (I already drink Fanta; therefore, the Fantanas are art) and some shows, to certain people, might be functional (The O'Reilly Factor is a source of information to be used when making decisions). But there are also many shows whose slotting to sell max-revenue ad time (Everybody Loves Raymond on TBS 3 nights a week baby) only serves a purpose to the operators of the television station, as with films and their producers. To the audience, these television presentations may very well be gratuitous.

Some people might think that just labeling all functionless timewasters as Art or Possible Art is too broad, but I also think a lot of people when talking about "What is Art" forget that a lot of art is Bad Art, so you have to remember to include that too.

Rambling.

That's a very culturally specific definition, though--Aristotle thinks art has a very direct purpose, many cultures have not distinguished between art and social function. My question is, what do we gain from this definition? What is it about capitalism (or whatever) that makes this opposition feel necessary?

This should be a bumper sticker.

Because:

http://www.themockup.com/archives/images/guinness.jpg

I also love how capitalism gets blamed for my definition of art, up there. who gives a shit? I guess that's the point. Why does this argument have to arise? Because REAL ARTISTS want to be able to differentiate themselves from RICH ARTISTS? No bohemianism, no credibility?

TS: Selling one item for $1,000,000 vs. selling 1,000,000 items for $1.

xpost...mmmmaybe

None of this relates to the beforehand processes of art (or commerce for that matter), and I think demonstrates why statements like "there is a difference between commercial and artistic" are provocative. Ultimately, I think most people use jaymc's definition of art to some degree, and the "commercial" or "artistic" process put in place beforehand is mostly unknown/ignored/rejected/discarded. However, I still think it's important to remember that it is there, even if its effect on an audience isn't what its producer might have wanted or predicted. IMO, it's another way to measure behavioral form, social meaning/effect, how people miss/get each other without even trying, etc etc.

Can you say more, Tom? I probably arrived upon my definition after taking a great aesthetics class while studying in the UK.

Yeah, this is all definitely interesting and worthwhile to pursue. I guess I probably just shrink from considering it when it seems like it creates undue biases in evaluation.

Lynch / Kubrick = successful commercial artists
Michael Bay = director of commercials
Stan Brakhage = artist (note that Brakhage believed experimental films would eventually be shown in multiplexes - he wasn't afraid of commerciality, he just wasn't compatible with it)

What's interesting is how commerciality in art drives capital and innovation into a discipline - a double-edged sword that both lifts all boats and yet locks some out of the party (please excuse the nightmarishly mixed metaphor). For instance, the innovations driven by the Hollywood money machine in the first half of the 20th century surely made the technical aspects of filmmaking easier in the long run - and provided a fertile playground for the new wave of filmmakers in the 70s. But that was a fluke, and generally the system results in a hierarchy where only the proven and the profitable are given access to resources.

In music, one could argue that the commercial success of rock created a home recording industry, and today almost anyone with a little time and money can record something that would've only been possible in an expensive studio 10-20 years ago. Whether that's a good or bad thing for music is up for debate, I guess.

Building on Edward's point, is there a definable point in any given human culture where commercial success became the indicator of a lessening of intrinsic artistic value? Basically, who invented the concept of "the sellout"? Who assigned the pursuit of an aesthetic paradigm with "good" connotations and the pursuit of recompense with "bad" connotations? "Uncompromising" is almost universally used as a positive attribute when describing an artistic endeavor; why?

Where does DYI fit into all of this? A friend of mine semi-seriously holds the opinion that anything she sees in an art gallery that she could have done herself isn't really art; does that opinion support or undermine the artistic process?

Anything she sees in an art gallery that anyone else could have done AND DID, makes it not art. Art is not necessarily technique (ie craft) - it's expression.

When an artist has a student carry out the design for him, who is the artist? (Monet, Picasso, Calder )

Does the word "art" encompass ingenuity by definition?

"Uncompromising" is almost universally used as a positive attribute when describing an artistic endeavor; why?

Thurston [Moore]: Didn't you see the quote on the back of our CD? It's from Jack Brewer, the singer from Saccharine Trust. He said, "Once the music leaves your head, it's already compromised."

(Wow, that Jack Brewer quote is fantastic.)

The answers to these questions (and many more) depend on having every point of view locked inside your brain - hence, end program. However, I believe that an artist's point of view is the most important thing he/she "possesses". Perhaps next most important are their ideas, then their ability to pull them off "artistically" and finally, their ability to withstand/adapt to no one caring.

Maybe another way of looking at this thread is to say art is pointing a mirror at the audience, commerce is trying to look in the same direction (or appear that way anyway).

No no no, that's not right at all!

The point isn't to come up with THE ANSWER; it's to exchange ideas and philosophies and to get a better understanding of where everyone participating in the conversation is coming from. Trends of opinion that might lead to a sample-constrained consensus are just a bonus.

If the first person intends it to be art, then yes. But the second person is just copying - unless the copying itself is some expression.

doers = craftsmen.

-- TV writers, artists or craftsmen? Does it make a difference whether they're writing "The King of Queens" or "Prime Suspect," and if so why? How about commercial/ad writers? Why screen writers but not TV?

-- Will Stephen King ever be a part of TEH CANON, or is he just a commercial hack? How about Michener? Or Neal Stephenson? What's the difference? Why, say, Pynchon but not Stephenson?

-- How about in fashion? Industrial design (e.g. all the Graves stuff at Target)?

x-post

Late 18th-early 19th c? Romanticism, maybe?

(xpost: MVB, that's interesting. Can you point me towards something/someone that makes you suggest that?)

See also Warhol, Andy. But then that twists back around to asking whether the things he was copying and monkeying with were themselves art, which then doubles back on the whole intent of the pop-art movement.

OK WTF

Aesthetics != a criminal investigation. You don't have to figure out who's ultimately responsible. Unless you're writing a check, I suppose.

America in the first part of the 20th century exhibits a strong streak of anti-intellectualism, and becomes the dream factory for the world in regards to movies & music. The lowest common denominator and factory approaches are applied to art, with stunning ($$) results. (And with quick criticism - in 1932 Huxley's Brave New World describes movies being dedicated to sex + violence to entertain a populace bombed out on mood-smoothing drugs. Aesthetically it's a crap book, but his take on modern society can be so prescient it's scary. It's like he's describing Southern California of the 70s - or today.)

The increasing "difficulty" of modern art (Picasso, Joyce, Stravinsky) creates a schism between artists and their audiences, and there emerges the highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow concept. A question is whether this has always been the case (new styles are usually shocking and aren't easily apprehended by the general public for decades), or if modernism constitutes a real turning point.

But I'd say yr culprit is the Industrial Revolution and the havoc it wreaked on human culture + society.

Re: uncompromising, if somebody called your work of art compromising (or how about compromised!) it wouldn't really sound like a compliment, would it?

well my end program really just meant the seizure I go into when I try get all those points of view stuffed in, but anyway...

My personal feeling is that DIY is neutral. Any process is neutral. It might affect my view of art positively or negatively, so it's not right to ask if DIY is art, or somehow devalues art. I think your friend is way off, but then you probably do too. And does art encompass ingenuity - hmm, I guess it depends on what you consider ingenuity. Certainly technical ingenuity isn't a prerequisite to be A Great Artist. However, IMO if you have ideas and are telling the truth, technical facility can only help. All of this, totally completely subjective obv.

But that doesn't really answer the question. Is a rigid line from conception to execution to consumption so crucial to art that "uncompromised" is the highest praise one can get? Sometimes "uncompromising" is shorthand for "conceptually constrained." I mean, KoRN is pretty umcompromising, I guess, but who cares? What does that tell me about the value of their output? Not much.

And this also gets to what's alluded to above, collaborative art, with the Lennon/McCartney example. You better believe that stuff was compromised, again and again. Does that lessen its aesthetic value? Not at all.

But his or her work has to fall within a conceptual framework that's ahared by *somebody* for it to be at all intelligible.

Always, there's an assumed political sensibility underneath all this, a fundamental idea of human society and how one should respond to it.

Ha, another question: "Art is inherently selfish.": T/F?

(xpost: MVB, so basically you're coming down on the "T" side of that question?)

I think what makes it (often) invalid is that this aesthetic is usually unexamined or assumed. So it's not a question of saying "I value art that requires skill/imagination and here's why" but "Art requires skill/imagination." This closes the door on discussion.

I was going to answer that "T" but then I think almost everything is inherently selfish in a way. But I still answer with "T" because either the artist is creating for his own satisfaction or he is creating so people say, "wow, you are really good at art."

I think "uncompromising" gets props because people figure if someone went to all the trouble of "not changing" then they must really believe in what they are doing - and if you happen to also believe in what they are doing, it's as close to "the truth" as most people get. And I do think art is essentially about what is true (in a spiritual sense).

The clear rub is that no one ever really knows exactly what someone else is thinking. The real bond between artist and audience is that you have two parties who *appear to be on the same page*, regardless of how either one of them got there. A lot of people will say "uncompromising" when they mean "harsh" or "stubborn" or something else that probably gives credence to their own sense of being oppressed in some way - and I guess that in and of itself is not a terrible thing, to be inspired by art to rise above or whatever. At the same time, it's very easy to delude oneself that way, and certainly easy to be a lazy fucking record reviewer that way. It would probably be better for everyone if people learned to deal with uncertainty rather than latching onto what seems true at the time and hoping it really is, but that doesn't appear to be the way stuff works. Hence: art, religion, cynicism after lunch

I guess I do actually feel people finding some truth in anything is good, even if they do for a bunch of reasons I find ridiculous. Anyway, it's better than an alternative where no one finds anything anywhere that hasn't already been found for them.

There's the classic sense of uncompromising where it means something - e.g. MLK, Gandhi, Doestoevsky = uncompromising in that their belief system was more compelling than the pressure applied to them to conform to the status quo.

Then there's uncompromising when it doesn't mean shit - e.g. Korn = uncompromising.

I'm not going to exclude the functional, because that means claiming that architecture isn't art - so I'll happily let in TV ads and furniture and ceramics and whatever you want that anyone makes or merely recontextualises as art. That's not to say that I think that many TV ads are any good as art, of course.

Being commercial is a separate concept. Things that are commercial can be good art or bad art (as well as being non-art), as can things that aren't commercial, of course. Obviously if the intent is to be commercial (or to be functional ahead of anything else) that generally lessens the odds of producing good art, but it certainly doesn't prevent it. I always recall seeing film of John Ford being interviewed by some very earnest post-Nouvelle Vague Europeans, and being asked what he was trying to achieve in a particular film: "I was trying to achieve a cheque. Forty thousand dollars was what I was trying to achieve." I don't remember which film it was, and I suspect he was winding them up to a large extent, but whatever the case, we don't need to somehow determine how much his intentions were commercial and how much artistic to judge whether his films are any good. (My guess: he didn't see the two things as being in opposition - making the best western he could was the way to make a successful movie. This could also apply to makers of pop records, for instance, and many other things.)

or better yet -- YNGWIE!

Nerdy question, but anyone know (or care?) when "compromise" settled into its negative meaning.

PRINT THE LEGEND!

To say that an object (the artwork) is commercial is to say something about the producer’s (the artist’s) intentions.

For brevity’s sake, let’s say that the producer’s intentions can be classified in two primary categories:
A: The producer (primarily) intended to make the object for the sake of art.
B: The producer (primarily) intended to make the object to sell.

Let’s say we can actually determine the producer’s intentions. If the object clearly falls into category A. then it can be classified as art, good or bad. Oh, I know the ontology of art is more open to debate than that, but let’s limit this to the discussion of whether the commercial can be artistic. If the object clearly falls into category B, then we have to decide; can it still be art?

But before we even get to that, let’s back up. How can we determine the producer’s intentions in the first place? Simply, we cannot. In fact, I question whether it is important to determine the artist’s intentions when I am relating to the object (the art) directly.

I think that the label “commercial”, when applied to works of art, is rarely used in a way that makes sense. When a critic invokes the label “commercial” to describe an object, they are generally misapplying it. I think that generally, to say that something is commercial is to say that the producer intended to infuse it with saleable qualities, not necessarily with artistic qualities. But in practice, what I think happens is that the critic identifies qualities in the object (or in the mechanism for the delivery of the object) as being the same as, or similar to, qualities that one would expect to see in an object intended to be commercial. Shorter version: If it looks like it could sell, or if it is later promoted as a commodity, it is commercial. But does this make sense?

1)It is easy to imagine an object that falls into category “A” that has qualities that are consistent with objects that fall into category B.

2) It is also easy to imagine an object in category “A” that at some point is promoted by commercial interests.

3) Furthermore it is easy to imagine a producer who makes a long line of objects over time, where a subset of the earlier objects are considered to be “artistic” and a subset of the later objects are considered to be “commercial”, but all the objects made by this producer actually fall into category “A”.

Provide your own examples. These things happen all the time.

Popularity and commoditization are transitory qualities that do not exist in the object itself. For example, it is easy to imagine an object that falls into category B that fails to sell. Is such an object commercial?

Happens all the time.

So how do we decide when art is commercial? I don’t think we can. Do we know what we’re really saying when we make the claim that an object of art is commercial? Most of the time I think the whole “commercial” distinction is confused bullshit.

Judge the object of art by it's own merits. Let the artists make some scratch. Baby needs a new pair of shoes.

Mixing up personal characteristics with someone's creative output is a bit of a tar pit, no?

Hahaha -- I work in marketing! But yeah, good point about being uncompromising in the face of pressure vs. just being a jerk.

A funny example from the world of pop music: Liz Phair. If you listen to consumers/the audience/the market, her last two albums -- done in a conscious bid to appeal to the top 40 landscape -- were perfect examples of compromise, selling out, sacrificing integrity, whatevah. Letting the dollar dollar bill rather than her own drive to create shape what she wanted to do. But if you ask Liz Phair, her earlier work was compromised, because she had to jigger herself into a constraining indie sound and culture that she hated, and big pop stuff was what she wanted to do all along.

So from where the audience sits, her later -- "compromised" -- material is significantly weaker. From where she sits, her earlier -- "compromised" -- material wasn't true to her instincts. (I think she's lying to herself, us, or both, in a post facto bid to justify trying to make more money, as if she needed to justify it, but whatever.) Makes for an interesting take on it.

If we're talking about artists' intent, is the real debate artists who create with a perceived audience's needs in mind vs. those who are indifferent to an audience's needs?

Even still, such distinctions become faulty when looking at individuals. And yes, Ford and other directors, as well as many songwriters, were in it for the money.

1
2
3

Why or why not?

1
2
3

Why or why not?

Where Have All the Strivers Gone?

...literary fiction is defined, in part, by its distance from popular fiction. And a crucial aspect of our whole high-low cultural system is that high culture mustn't be created for worldly gain. Which is an especially touchy subject when it comes to the novel.

Like old Goriot's upwardly mobile daughters, literary fiction has had to turn its back on its miserable origins. Long ago, the novel was condescended to as mere entertainment, and could only envy the cultural status that forms like lyric poetry and verse drama enjoyed. Literary fiction only fully emerged as a self-conscious genre in the later decades of the 19th century, and the gap between it and popular fiction widened in the first decade or so of the 20th.

Trollope, for one, cocked a snook at the trend, and in his autobiography he insisted that his "first object" in writing was to rake in the bucks. Bad move. The book's publication in 1883, shortly after his death, pretty much scuttled his literary reputation for years. Compare that Victorian scribbler to a popular British literary figure from our own era of candor: "What I care about is literary durability," Martin Amis has said. "That is all that matters to me, and I'm just happy enough when I have an advance of £250." You've got to marvel at how our most brazen talents go knock-kneed before the ideology of art. Because literary fiction is, by stipulation, fiction that isn't written for personal reward, ensuring its status means roping off the subject of status. To betray a non-ironic interest in money, power or fame would compromise its place in the culture.

The objects produced by the culture industry, not really democratic and falling short from what art should really be, elaborated not for themselves but aiming for a market, made in function of a market, and these objects , so-so vehicle of a certain ideology, are helping to create a certain type of person,
a person that is giving in to the temptations made by the market, that have offers to these made-up demands, carricature of deep psychological needs used by the culture industry and it's mechanisms of commercial exploitation.

I'm not even going to bother with "what art should really be," but perhaps you can tell me where exists or existed this great, pure art that is in no way constrained by or aiming for a market? I mean even serialist composers had to worry about getting their music performed and recorded, and ironically there was a period when the "market" for academic music was so dominated by serialism (a music intended to achieve some high form of artistic purity), that ONLY serialist composers were taken seriously by academics.

YSI? I mean, um, examples please?

Hello there Bethune!

http://www.socialistworld.net/pics/p4.gif

Making a living as someone with artistic talents of one sort or another is neither harder nor easier than making a living based on any other personal inclinations, save that one has to be competent, of course. Innovating in art is like innovating in any field -- acceptable if one's workmates agree on its merits and if the participatory plan find the workplace as a whole to be socially valuable.

If you think that there is something called art which entitles something called an artist to live a life free of responsibility to the community, free of responsibility to co-workers, and remunerated at a rate above and beyond others, then anarchist art will be a horror to your vision.

If you think that people doing art, like all other people, should contribute to the community and be supported for their socially valued labors, and that their endeavors should arise from their termperments and tastes, not from imposition by elites, parecon art will be a delight for you to behold.

Wow! ILE is action-movie crazy today!

Not a bad revive, sir.

Does creating something for commercial purposes invalidate all of its aesthetic qualities?

This formulation of the question is much clearer than the one in the thread title and x1000 easier to answer. It's almost too bad DJP restated it that way, because the original thread title allows more interesting ideas to arise.

I define art as something that has no obvious intrinsic purpose. Art is (must be) gratuitous.

Oh, Tombot

Straight out of Wilde!

Yes, but Tombot lacks some of Wilde's paradoxical poise, his permanently despairing wink

Commerciality and art can exist side-by-side - sometimes it can't. Depends on the artist.

Lynch / Kubrick = successful commercial artists
Michael Bay = director of commercials
Stan Brakhage = artist (note that Brakhage believed experimental films would eventually be shown in multiplexes - he wasn't afraid of commerciality, he just wasn't compatible with it)

What's interesting is how commerciality in art drives capital and innovation into a discipline - a double-edged sword that both lifts all boats and yet locks some out of the party (please excuse the nightmarishly mixed metaphor). For instance, the innovations driven by the Hollywood money machine in the first half of the 20th century surely made the technical aspects of filmmaking easier in the long run - and provided a fertile playground for the new wave of filmmakers in the 70s. But that was a fluke, and generally the system results in a hierarchy where only the proven and the profitable are given access to resources.

In music, one could argue that the commercial success of rock created a home recording industry, and today almost anyone with a little time and money can record something that would've only been possible in an expensive studio 10-20 years ago. Whether that's a good or bad thing for music is up for debate, I guess.

― Edward III (edward iii), Thursday, April 13, 2006 3:31 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The notion of the starving artist is very old, probably as old as the concept of a fat artist being not a very good artist - but things really start to fork (in the Western world) during the middle of the 19th century. There are some mile markers along the way - the rise of the middle class, industrialization, mass media and popular culture. It starts in painting, I think - the classic representational forms become passe with the rise of impressionism, which injects a healthy does of subjectivism into the mix. The rest of the art forms fall into line, and, as one wag once said, "Modernism reduced the audience for poetry from tens of thousands to ten."
America in the first part of the 20th century exhibits a strong streak of anti-intellectualism, and becomes the dream factory for the world in regards to movies & music. The lowest common denominator and factory approaches are applied to art, with stunning ($$) results. (And with quick criticism - in 1932 Huxley's Brave New World describes movies being dedicated to sex + violence to entertain a populace bombed out on mood-smoothing drugs. Aesthetically it's a crap book, but his take on modern society can be so prescient it's scary. It's like he's describing Southern California of the 70s - or today.)

The increasing "difficulty" of modern art (Picasso, Joyce, Stravinsky) creates a schism between artists and their audiences, and there emerges the highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow concept. A question is whether this has always been the case (new styles are usually shocking and aren't easily apprehended by the general public for decades), or if modernism constitutes a real turning point.

But I'd say yr culprit is the Industrial Revolution and the havoc it wreaked on human culture + society.

Re: uncompromising, if somebody called your work of art compromising (or how about compromised!) it wouldn't really sound like a compliment, would it?

― Edward III (edward iii), Thursday, April 13, 2006 4:56 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

brilliant pair of posts from E3 here

i have this sad, pavlovian, "yay, fun!" response to discussion topic like this. sad because the fun-anticipation is so helplessly automatic and cargo-cult hopless. some buried part of my brain must flash back to endless, wheel-spinning adolescent discussions about art, philosophy, politics, whatever other <<life, man>> shit then fascinated, and the rest of me goes, YES, THAT! I WANT THAT! but there is no that. nothing left to discover. if you turn over a rock, you only find a little sign that says, "you already turned over this rock a bunch of times. go find another rock."

even those E3 posts, however finely wrought, seem only to agreeably chain the familiar (no real slam, E, probably just the expression of a morose).