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Creating a City of Arts Summary

Why the Arts Need the City

1. The city is the source of artistic creativity for art. The city is saturated with people and their ideas, fantasies, experiences and relationships. It is also full of diversity, disparity and discordance. These very qualities are often inspirations for the arts. Cities were where artists congregated to exchange ideas and stimulate one another's creativity.

2. The city is a marketplace in which cultural experiences and products could be traded.

Why the City Needs the Arts

Economic Benefits of Art

Economic gains from the arts are believed to be accrued partly in the form of jobs and revenue from tourism.

Creative individuals are most attracted to places that not only offer diversity in society but that are exiting and stimulating to live in. As the arrival of the “creative class” is believed to stimulate further innovation that will drive the economy, cities are eager to attract such creative individuals.

Physical & Image Enhancements

Arts and cultural activities help to attract people into the city to engage in various cultural experiences and events. This is particularly important to downtowns because the arts can help to enliven the spaces in city centers which would otherwise be dead after office hours.

The arts have stimulated urban gentrification [def: restoration of deteriorated urban property] when old and disused buildings are converted into residential and work spaces for artists. In many cities, to meet space demands of the arts, it is common for old buildings to be refurbished and adaptively reused as arts facilities.

Example: Arts stimulated physical improvements in New York's Soho industrial district. Artists in the 1970s led the way for conversion of formerly derelict manufacturing spaces into residential units which ultimately resulted in rise in market value for these properties.

With physical enhancement, a city often experiences a concomitant [def: accompanying] improvement in its image. The arts generate a “symbolic economy” that re-images the city as an attractive place in which to live and work.

Social Benefits

Cultural festivals, community plays and other arts events have brought people closer together. The arts are therefore touted as a tool for strengthening social cohesion.

Cultural development used as a way of cultivating the social graces of its people. (Effective?) As incredulous as this may seem, the arts are touted increasingly to generate such social benefits by helping to alter behaviour and inculcating the desired social values among communities.

Aims of Singapore's Renaissance City

Economic

• Culture is a means of image branding, to help Singapore project soft power on the global marketplace.

• Cosmopolitan city to welcome foreign talents (rise of the creative class). According to Richard Florida, creative workers tend to gravitate towards and thrive in places that are vibrant and stimulating.

Nation Building

• Inspire Singaporeans to stay bonded to country.

• Legitimizing multi-culturalism, smooth out potential racial tensions.

• Gracious society (learn the finer things in life.)

Strategies for Singapore's Renaissance City

Develop major arts companies

• Currently only two major art companies in Singapore: Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Chinese Orchestra.

• More “cultural ambassadors” should be nurtured.

• Direct substantial amount of resources to develop a few selected groups, caused resentment from majority of the arts community.

Go International

• Promoting Singapore's artists and artworks internationally.

• Facilitate collaboration between local and foreign artists.

• Singapore Seasons: London 2005, Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Develop an Arts and Cultural Economy

• Invest in prestigious art events to enhance reputation and project image of being in the top league of cultural cities.

  • Singapore Arts Festival

  • Singapore Biennale

• Promoting arts and cultural tourism

• Tax incentives to encourage donation of cultural artefacts

  • Double Tac Deduction Scheme

  • Reduced taxes on auction houses

Infrastructure and Facilities

• Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay (costs over $600 million.)

• Extension of Singapore History Museum, Singapore Art Museum.

• Arts Housing Scheme – provide work spaces for arts organizations and individual artists. (90% subsidy by MITA)

Develop strong arts and cultural base

• Arts Education

• Previously, only available choices were NAFA or LASELLE-SIA, which had low admission requirements and did not even require entrants to have O Levels arts.

• NTU School of Arts, Media and Design, etc. Tertiary level arts education.

Recognize and groom talents

• Arts scholarships, Singapore Youth Festival, etc.

Aims of Glasgow European City of Culture

• Develop post-industrial economy and improve city's image.

Strategies of Glasgow European City of Culture

Proactive Marketing “Hard Selling”

• Glasgow Miles Better campaign with Mr. Smiley icon.

• Promotion by Saatchi and Saatchi.

• Aimed to capture title for 1990 City of Culture.

• To alter the rough and unattractive image of the industrial city. Demonstrate its cultural richness and reinforce international profile.

Enhance Cultural Assets

• Consumption based strategy: use the arts to enhance tourism infrastructure, cultural facilities and programs. Scottish Opera, Scottish National Orchestra, etc.

• New art gallery housing the Burrell Collection. Attracted large number of visitors.

• Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, McLellan Galleries.

• Clean up physical environment, landscaping, stone cleaning, floodlighting buildings, etc.

• Enhance appearance of Victorian buildings and architectural gems.

Host Cultural Spectacles

• Visible high profile program of cultural activity

• 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival: 900 cultural events to heighten the air of festivity.

Impacts of Glasgow European City of Culture

• Gains

  • Improve image and perception of city

  • Short-term economic gains.

  • Some cultural development

• Criticism

  • Unsustainable economic benefits. Visitor figures fell overnight after the mega-event was over in 1990. Unemployment was recorded at 15%.

  • Only benefited business elites and civil servants, largely concentrated on city centre.

  • Program relied mainly on imported foreign artists, inimical to the local arts scene.

  • Spectacle-making efforts crowd out smaller players in the arts scene.

  • Synthetic, hyped up and manufactured.

  • Theatre production “The Ship”: intended to showcase Glasgow's historical development as a shipping industry. But misrepresented the history and lacked coherence and critical awareness.

  Lessons for Singapore

• Cultural hardware alone is insufficient. Cathedrals of consumption (concert halls, etc.) may be nothing more than empty shells. Most local arts groups will not be able to produce on a scale for the Esplanade.

• Cathedrals of consumption may resort to importing international cultural extravaganzas.

• Arts may be catering only to the nouveau rich, does not involve people from all segments of society.

Arts and Cultural Development in Chicago

More than 150 years of cultural legacy. Arts and culture generally allowed to evolve on its own, within the facilitating framework set up by the city.

Interest in contemporary art stimulated by the dedication of Picasso's untitled sculpture. Public art program to develop the Loop into an outdoor sculpture gallery.

Chicago Cultural Center offered activities free of charge to everyone. Branched out and channel efforts to other parts of city (rather than just the downtown area).

Chicago Cultural Plan

Organic form of evolution because of a inclusive process, allowing a diverse range of stakeholders to be brought to discussion. More than 300 meetings with more than 10,000 representations from all art disciplines and cultural institutions.

A plan that springs from the hearts and minds of the people.

Strategies for Arts and Culture Development

Make arts and culture widely and easily accessible

• Stimulate local interest in the arts, promoting arts to Chicagoans, rather than foreign tourists.

• Performing arts showcase during lunchtime for office workers in the downtown area to enjoy.

• Free films and concert performances nearly every other evening in Chicago's parks.

• Public art – Percent for Art Ordinance – require 1.33% of original budgeted cost of construction of municipal buildings to be set aside to commission public art.

Support local artistic talent

• Gallery 37 – job training and education program in the arts for youths. Young apprentices hone their skills in specific disciplines under mentorship.

• Emerging art groups can take up rent-free residence and perform at the Theatre on the Lake.

• Chicago Artists Month every October. Public meet the artists at their studios and see how they work. Creates interaction between public and artists. Wider audience base for artists.

• CityArts Program. Tri-annual grant.

Celebrate local cultural assets

• Cows on Parade (1999) exhibition, where 320 fiberglass cows were painted by Chicago artists and displayed around the city. Cows symbolised Chicago's legend of a cow starting the Great Fire of 1871 by kicking over kerosene lamp... ha ha.

• Huge gallery space of Chicago Cultural Centre to feature works of local artists.

Impacts of Arts Development

• Benefits

  • Improved physical environment, contribution to tourism and economy.

  • Greater cultural vibrancy, diversity, greater awareness and participation in the arts.

• Problems

  • Limitations in funding (as number of artists increased, funding became increasingly scarce.)

Lessons for Singapore

Emphasize the local

• Sydney 2000 Cultural Olympiad (cultural festival held in conjunction with Olympic Games for host city.) Instead of taking opportunity to provide space for local artistic expression, the organizing community programmed series of international acts. However, imported shows seem to cater to international visitors rather than local audience. Dependence on international visitors is not sustainable.

Assignment

An effective cultural program has to balance between:

• Hardware versus Software

• External versus Internal

• Top-down versus Bottom-up planning

• Consumption versus Production

Pick three points and write an essay.

puppeteered

Plato

Plato had a love-hate relationship with the arts. He must have had some love for the arts, because he talks about them often, and his remarks show that he paid close attention to what he saw and heard. He was also a fine literary stylist and a great story-teller; in fact he is said to have been a poet before he encountered Socrates and became a philosopher. Some of his dialogues are real literary masterpieces. On the other hand, he found the arts threatening. He proposed sending the poets and playwrights out of his ideal Republic, or at least censoring what they wrote; and he wanted music and painting severely censored. The arts, he thought, are powerful shapers of character. Thus, to train and protect ideal citizens for an ideal society, the arts must be strictly controlled.

Plato's influence on western culture generally is a very strong one, and this includes a strong influence on the arts, and on theories of art. In the case of the arts and aesthetic theory that influence is mostly indirect, and is best understood if one knows a little bit about his philosophy.

Plato saw the changing physical world as a poor, decaying copy of a perfect, rational, eternal, and changeless original. The beauty of a flower, or a sunset, a piece of music or a love affair, is an imperfect copy of Beauty Itself. In this world of changing appearances, while you might catch a glimpse of that ravishing perfection, it will always fade. It’s just a pointer to the perfect beauty of the eternal. The same goes for other Essences, like Justice. Anyone knows that Real Justice is too much to hope for in this corrupt world. The best you can find is a rough approximation. To take a third example, the most carefully drawn circle turns out to be irregular if you inspect it closely enough. Like The Point, The Line, and all geometric shapes, The Circle is a mathematical ideal. It is not possible to draw a Real Circle, but only an imperfect physical copy (or instance) of one. (If you have ever striven to acheive an ideal, you may have have some sympathy with this part of Plato's philosophy.)

Beauty, Justice, and The Circle are all examples of what Plato called Forms or Ideas. Other philosophers have called them Universals. Many particular things can have the form of a circle, or of justice, or beauty. For Plato, these Forms are perfect Ideals, but they are also more real than physical objects. He called them "the Really Real". The world of the Forms is rational and unchanging; the world of physical appearances is changeable and irrational, and only has reality to the extent that it succeeds in imitating the Forms. The mind or soul belongs to the Ideal world; the body and its passions are stuck in the muck of the physical world. So the best human life is one that strives to understand and to imitate the Forms as closely as possible. That life is the life of the mind, the life of the Philosopher (literally, the lover of wisdom). Self control, especially control of the passions, is essential to the soul that wants to avoid the temptations of sensuality, greed, and ambition, and move on to the Ideal World in the next life.

Of course there is a lot more to Plato’s philosophy than this; but this is enough background to begin explaining his views about the arts. (For more on Plato’s philosophy, visit the library, or check out the online Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) Plato had two theories of art. One may be found in his dialogue The Republic, and seems to be the theory that Plato himself believed. According to this theory, since art imitates physical things, which in turn imitate the Forms, art is always a copy of a copy, and leads us even further from truth and toward illusion. For this reason, as well as because of its power to stir the emotions, art is dangerous. Plato's other theory is hinted at in his shorter dialogue Ion, and in his exquisitely crafted Symposium. According to this theory the artist, perhaps by divine inspiration, makes a better copy of the True than may be found in ordinary experience. thus the artist is a kind of prophet. Here are some features of the two theories:

1. Art is imitation This is a feature of both of Plato's theories. Of course he was not the first or the last person to think that art imitates reality. The idea was still very strong in the Renaissance, when Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters, said that "painting is just the imitation of all the living things of nature with their colors and designs just as they are in nature." It may still be the most commonly held theory. Most people still think that a picture must be a picture of something, and that an artist is someone who can make a picture that "looks just like the real thing". It wasn't until late in the nineteenth century that the idea of art as imitation began to fade from western aesthetics, to be replaced by theories about art as expression, art as communication, art as pure form, art as whatever elicits an "aesthetic" response, and a number of other theories.

So art is imitation. But what does it imitate? Here is where Plato's two theories come in. In the Republic, Plato says that art imitates the objects and events of ordinary life. In other words, a work of art is a copy of a copy of a Form. It is even more of an illusion than is ordinary experience. On this theory, works of art are at best entertainment, and at worst a dangerous delusion.

A moment's thought will suggest a way of building a more art-friendly theory out of Plato's philosophy. What if the artist is somehow able to make a truer copy of the Forms than our ordinary experience offers? This theory actually appears in Plato's short early dialogue, the Ion. Socrates is questioning a poet named Ion, who recites Homer's poetry brilliantly but is no good at reciting anything else. Socrates is puzzled by this; it seems to him that if Ion has an art, or skill, of reciting poetry he should be able to apply his skilled knowledge to other poets as well. He concludes that Ion doesn't really possess skilled knowledge. Rather, when he recites Homer, he must be inspired by a god.

The Ion drips with sarcasm. Plato didn't take the "art by divine inspiration" theory very seriously. But many ancient, medieval, and modern artists and aestheticians have found it irresistible. After all, aren't artists often inspired? Doesn't their creative genius often produce wonderfully surprising results, about which the artist will say, "I don't know how I did that?" Most important, don't artists show us the essence of things, and reveal truths that we wouldn't otherwise see?

The view of the artist as inspired revealer of ideal essences fits well with the spirit of Plato's Symposium, a dialogue full of speeches in praise of Love, in which Socrates gives a compelling picture of the ascent from sexual love, to the aesthetic appreciation of beautiful bodies, to the love of beautiful souls, and finally to the the contemplation of the ideal Form of Beauty itself. The same spirit fills much classic Greek art. Late classical sculpture presents gods and heroes as ideal bodies, built in perfect proportions, and filled with a cool repose, as if they inhabited a perfect and changeless divine world. The classical ideal of the artist as capturing an essence has continued to exert great power, from the Renaissance rediscovery of the Greek canons of proportion to the twentieth century sculptures of Constantin Brancusi, the paintings of Piet Mondrian, and the color theories of Vasily Kandinsky and the Blue Rider (der Blaue Reiter) group.

The idea of the artist as divinely inspired, or even possessed, has also persisted to the present day. Some of our most common art vocabulary derives from this idea. For example, the word "music" derives from the Greek Muses, the demigods who inspired an artist's work. The notion of "genius" is originally the same; your genius was your personal daimon or inspiring spirit. There are countless paintings from the Renaissance which depict a genius of this sort, or an inspiring muse; and there are some which combine the ideas of inspiration and imitation, showing an artist or musician contemplating a divine ideal, and producing art as a result. An example, which may appear a bit differently to modern eyes than to Renaissance ones, is Titian's "Venus and Music" (Venere, Amore e Organista). The idea of genius was strong in the Romantic period, and has certainly not gone away since that time!

Problems with the imitation theory. In either of its two versions, as imitations of the world or imitation of an ideal, the imitation theory has problems. It is at least plausible as a theory about representational painting, drawing and sculpture; and it can be stretched to fit some abstract work, as in the case of Brancusi and Mondrian. But even with such work it leaves a lot out. With an artist like Jackson Pollack it leaves out everything; what do his drip paintings imitate? And how is the theory supposed to work for music? What does music represent? Plato spoke about music representing natural sounds, and emotions, as did Aristotle. but even if one agrees that music imitates emotions, could one build a theory of music out of this fact alone?

2. Art is powerful, and therefore dangerous Poetry, drama, music, painting, dance, all stir up our emotions. All of the arts move people powerfully. They can strongly influence our behavior, and even our character. For that reason Plato insisted that music (especially music), along with poetry and drama and the other arts, should be part of the education of young citizens in his ideal republic, but should be strictly censored to present, at first, only the good. (That stories and images can shape character may seem obvious enough; but how does music do this? Plato was much impressed with the theories of Pythagoras, and his number mysticism. Early thinking about geometric ratios was partly inspired by noticing the series of overtones connected with the vibration of a string. A string, when plucked, vibrates along its whole length, but also in halves, giving the octave, and in other divisions which give the fifth, the third, and the rest of the overtone series. These are the bell-like higher tones string players produce when they play "harmonics". Plato thought that the right sort of music would help to set the soul in harmony rather than discord. But that meant excluding certain musical modes from the Republic, and keeping only those that were conducive to a properly ordered soul, i.e., one whose will ruled its passions at the direction of its reason. Only when young people were ready should the strength of their character be tested by exposing them to depictions of evil, and to the more promiscuous modes of music.)

From Plato to New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani, influential people through the centuries and across cultures have worried about the power of the arts to influence, and potentially to corrupt. It can be hard for a twenty first century westerner to sympathize with Plato's severe censorship of the arts. Little if anything is more valuable to us than our freedom; we don't take kindly to others telling us what we can watch or listen to or read. We believe in the free exchange of ideas, and let the best idea win. We might even try to justify this idea from Plato's own dialogues. Of course, Plato did not value freedom so highly as do we; he thought that freedom with no limits and no proper training would result in no good. In fact, he thought it would leave the mass of people vulnerable to deception, manipulation, and eventual enslavement by a tyrant. In spite of this, he agreed with modern people about the free exchange of ideas. There was no other way to arrive at truth, in his view. His problem with the arts was that they operated by images rather than by ideas, and thus that they might cloud the truth rather than clarifying it.

Perhaps a bit of "sympathy for the devil" is possible here. The most famous summary of Plato's philosophy is the allegory of the Cave, found in Book VII of his Republic. There Plato asks readers to imagine prisoners chained to a bench, facing the wall of a deep cave. Behind them is a six-foot wall, behind that a fire, and in between the fire and the wall walk actors carrying puppets on sticks. All the prisoners can see are the shadows cast by the puppets. That is their world, and they think it Reality. Imagine that a prisoner is somehow released. At first he or she will stumble in the dark, and be blinded by the fire, but then come to realize that the shadows are copies of the puppets. The liberated prisoner stumbles further up, all the way out the mouth of the cave and into the sunlight. There, when the sunblindness goes away, the prisoner sees the real things of which the puppets themselves are copies. Finally, he or she is able to see the sun, by whose light the real things are visible.

Why would Plato have seen the arts as shadows on the wall of the cave, rather than as shining symbols of the true spiritual world outside? The answer is that he saw both potentials. If he did not see the possibility that art could reveal truth and form character in a good way, he would not have recommended music and stories for the young. But why so much emphasis on the seductive shadow potential of art? Put the Allegory of the Cave into its obvious 21st century version, and one answer begs to be given. The prisoner becomes a couch potato, tied to the television, and taking the images and myths purveyed by the ads and the shows as the way things are. Are those images and myths powerful? Do they shape our picture of ourselves and the world? Do they distract us from knowing who we really are, what is really best for us, who would be a good political leader? The questions answer themselves. (But for a particularly powerful, detailed description of just how they do so, see the works of Stuart Ewen, particularly All Consuming Images and PR!) Plays and public oratory were the media and propaganda of Plato's day, and painting, statuary and music often served similar ends. Think "media", "propaganda", and Entertainment Tonight, rather than "fine art", and it is easier to gain some sympathy for Plato's views. It is surely a chief challenge of our time to enable free, honest, challenging communication while resisting the unreasoned power of advertising imagery and media hype. Whatever one thinks of Plato's solution to this problem, I suggest that this is one of the problems that elicited his proposals for severe censorship of the arts he so obviously loved and had been trained in. The solution may not appeal, but the problem is a real one.

Plato's influence came into the medieval European tradition through the filter of Neoplatonism, a much later modification of Platonic teachings that flourished in the centuries just before and after the time of Jesus. The most famous neo-Platonist was Plotinus. Plotinus and the other neo-Platonists made much of the idea of Beauty, and the soul's quest for it, as described in the Symposium. Through neoplatonism, Plato's second theory (art as imitation of eternal Beauty and eternal Truth) became the channel of his influence on the western middle ages and the renaissance.

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The Mass Media Use Art

Art as Subject-matter

• History of art constitutes an enormous bank of images that are out of copyright and are familiar to millions of consumers.

  • Familiar images facilitate rapid communication

  • Serve as tokens of high culture, superlative skill and supreme value. Signify good taste, sophisticated lifestyle, etc.

  • The product being advertised is supposed to acquire these qualities by association.

• 1981 Record cover for Bow Wow Wow's “Go Wild in the Country”. Recreated the composition of Manet's “The Lunch on the Grass” (1863) via staged photography.

Image of Artist in Advertisements

• In most cases, artists would probably be reluctant to lend their images to such purpose because they would regard it as undignified.

  • Andy Warhol is an exception, as a pop and business artist, he has no qualms about associating himself with commerce.

  • Warhol endorsed products for a range of companies, including Air France, Pioneer Electronics Corporation, etc.

• Famous artists of the past is more useful than living artists

  • Dead artists cannot object their use in advertisements, do not require fee.

  • Famous artists can be associated with particular countries or cities – Rembrandt with Amsterdam.

    • Ideal for purposes of travel and tourist advertising.

  • Artists as creative beings

    • 1966 American ad agency Leo Burnett Co., Inc. ran advert which featured images of the brothers Vincent and Theo Van Gogh, symbolizing the combination of creative flair and business acumen the agency claimed to provide.

    • 1972 Advert by Osborne Group for a seminar “The Management of Creativity”. Reproduction of Van Gogh's “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe” (1889). Graphic designers had retouched Vincent's eye to make him appear crazy.

  • Artist as a social type (use of anonymous artists)

    • 1970s Gordon's vodka advertisement showed a male sculptor standing next to a welded metal, abstract sculpture with a glass of vodka in his hand. Designed to appeal to sophisticated people. Artist represents tough, independent spirit, discerning in choice of alcohol.

Art as Source of Styles and Formal Innovations

• Contradiction between the intentions of modern art and advertising

  • Modern artists delay recognition of audience to renew their perception of the world, challenge viewers intellectually.

  • Advertising designers want to communicate messages and information rapidly to the general public.

• Nevertheless, designers require images to be unusual enough to stimulate interest, while being simple enough to understand.

• Modern art often serves the purpose of stimulating interest (esp. Surrealism and Pop art)

• Modern fine art as a “research and development” department of the mass media

  • Formal and technical experimentation

  • Promising discoveries assimilated into mass media

• “The Art Gallery” (1978) Cigarette advertisement

  • Setting of art gallery with dream-like quality.

  • Presence of cigarette packet inside a painting and a gallery, implies that it is a work of art in its own right.

• 1978 cover design of the London listings magazine Time Out, echoes Lichtenstein's comic-strip style.

• Advertising aspiring to the condition of fine arts

  • Highest production standards in colour photography, great deal of freedom for designer's imagination and creativity.

  • Annual grand award ceremonies for the best advertisements, which gain the status of masterpieces.

• Formal experimentation in mass media

  • Technological developments that yield greater illusionism in sound and images (special effects)

  • In majority of cases, the optical pleasure provided by visuals was designed to compensate the viewer for the banality of music, lyrics or performances.

  • Departures from naturalism in some drama series

  • However, most avant-garde film artists found it difficult to gain access to mainstream television because TV professionals kept tight editorial control.

    • Situation improved in 1982, when Channel 4 (a minority channel with a brief to innovate) appeared and transmitted an arts programme of anthologies of video art and animation.

Art as Subject-matter in the Cinema

• Films about artists (fictional or real)

• “Lust for Life” (1956)

  • Based on best-selling novelised biography of Van Gogh.

• Fundamental difficulty of films about art is the representation on one medium in another (still painting in a motion picture.) Audiences expect drama and action, not linger over a static painting.

• Emphasize the personality, life and loves of the artists.

• Usually require some half-finished pictures, which may not be genuine.

• Confront problem of compression (an entire life into 2 hours.)

  • Temptation to focus on a melodramatic incident, rather than paying attention to art theories.

  • Difficulty in translating to visual terms the internal mental processes of creation.

  • In “Lust for Life” Kirk Douglas emphasized the emotional intensity of van Gogh, but not his rational side. Raise question to how truthful they are to the past.

• Face 2-fold responsibility: to do justice to the material or object or study, and to meet the needs of the presumed audience.

Artists as Pool of Skilled Labour

• Major businesses sought to use art and culture to improve their corporate image and redeem “a vulgar technological and philistine” civilization.

  • 1935 The Container Corporation of America (CCA) commissioned leading modern artists such as Man Ray and de Kooning to create prestige advertisements. Endowed the CCA with an up-to-date corporate image and a unified design style.

• Disharmony between artists and businesses

  • Sir John Everett Millais's 1886 painting “Bubbles” - a portrait of his grandson blowing soap bubbles – was adapted for advertising Pears soap with Millias's permission.

  • Millias was angered but could do nothing to prevent the use because he had failed to register his ownership of copyright.

  • Unkind critics accused him of commercialism.

• Different value systems of fine art and industrial production are combined

  • 1978 BMW advert showing cars decorated by Alexander Calder, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein.

  • Cars are mass-produced, but advertisers persuade buyers that their choice of car expresses their individuality.

  • Art is seen as epitome of individualism, art used to individualize the products.

  • Paradoxically, the decorated cars are not for sale (since they have become works and art and therefore priceless.)

• Even though colour photography had replaced painting as the dominant visual medium, traditional skills are still required in preliminary stages of mass media production. E.g. Sketches and drawings during ideas phase of devising storyboards, etc.

• Drawing facilitates creative process, and are quick, cheap and flexible.

  • The grotesque, bio-mechanical Alien (1979) was designed by Hans Rudi Giger.

• The mass media, together with art councils and museums, brought about a significant democratization of high culture.

  • TV channels transmit arts programmes and series that contributes to public knowledge and understanding of traditional and contemporary art.

  • Criticism: media detach works from their physical, social, historical and religious contexts. Reproduction alters the look of the originals. Commercial purposes distort meaning and debase values. Secondary material and imagery obscures rather than clarify their aesthetic experience.