Media as Artform
For decades western art education has included mixed-media, multimedia and media studies under its umbrella. This has been in response to the postmodern urge to diversification of the creative process as product, and a desire to categorise and quantify art.
Conventional educationally challenged student doesn't know whether they prefer painting or sculpture? Tell them they're doing mixed-media. Good at computers though? Call it multimedia instead. Not enough time, money or discipline to make a coherent short film? Put that in multimedia too. The British art school tradition is an original version of the 'inclusivity' mantra, and good for all that. Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, David Bowie, Graham Coxon and Damien Hirst, just for a late 20th century handful, were all debt-accruing beneficiaries.
As the postmodern putsch started in earnest in the early 1990s, Hirst for one saw an opportunity, and inadvertently led the New British Artists into the mainstream by way of the media. His own sliced cows and suspended sharks were displayed next to paintings of Myra Hindley and the bloodied miniatures of The Chapman Brothers, all with one eye on the headlines.
Traditional painterly aesthetics were out; conceptual shock value was in. This had started 80 years previously when Marcel Duchamp had presented a urinal at the Paris Salon, signed R.Mutt, and put the question of what art was onto the viewer. Christo would wrap the Bundestag in linen mid-late century, and Tracey Emin presented her own chaotic bed at the end of it. The art became the viewer's reaction to the artist's concept.
As more and more art schools produced more and more painters and sculptors - some of them mindblowingly impressive – it became increasingly clear that quality skill in itself wasn't a 'story'. Journalists and editors are obsessed with stories, as they represent page turns, sales and clicks. Thus how a story was written up became an artform in itself, containing impact, emotion, and usually a picture of art or artist.
But as we all by now know, bad news sells: so if the artist wasn't somehow traumatised, addicted, dead or mad, the story became lesser. Does a tree make a sound when it falls in a forest if there's no one there to hear it? Does a home counties watercolour hung in a provincial gallery exist if no one buys it and no one comments on it? That depends on the degree of self-containment or expansionism of the artist.
Then art marketers of various sorts get involved – those responsible for those oft-talked about multi-million price tags, who have a vested interest in inflating and amplifying anything that happens – particularly if a certain artist signs to their agency or gallery. What is better known about Pablo Picasso; that he made over 30,000 artworks, that he was alleged to have treated women badly, his invention/popularisation of cubism, Des Mademoiselles d'Avignon, or Guernica? It depends on the fashion of the day.
In an era of identity politics Picasso's treatment of women. added to his 'cultural appropriation' of tribal masks, becomes the story; and the artist himself accordingly controversial, if not demonised. Is Maggie Hamblin better known for her stunningly surreal morphings of the figure into shapes that are not quite human, or her tetchy chain-smoking? It depends how you watch any documentary on her (and how that is edited).
When the medium becomes the story in this way, it can have serious implications for the concept of justice. While a paper may report on an artist on one page, it may report on a murder on another, and we are now used to this varied mix. During their trial, the four young men accused of murdering black teenager Stephen Lawrence in the early 1990s were declared 'MURDERERS' when editor Paul Dacre saw them confidently leaving court amidst a media storm. One week teenager cleared on appeal of the rape of another younger teen Sean Hogg is evil scum, the next he is a survivor of miscarriage of justice, and treated as such in grudging acknowledgment.
Whatever the guilt or innocence of the accused, this was editorial as judicial weapon, media-as-artform weaponised as social justice 'evidence'. When Cliff Richard was the most recent of a long list of celebrities accused of historical child abuse in the mid-2010s, a BBC reporter was on the scene at the same time as a police helicopter hovered over the singer's house. The fact that all this activity was based on DPP Keir Starmer and Alison Saunders' 'believe the victims' policy rather than on actual evidence was incidental in the pursuit of getting the scoop of 'another one', as acknowledged in text messages disclosed at trial.
Cliff, a then-septuagenarian who had spent his entire adult life entertaining people, felt the full sting of this new, other kind of artform, so far away from the positive vibes he had always tried to spread. The story, as content, had become more important than its subject: and that is the crux of media-as-artform. Postmodern culture generally has it that there is nothing new under the sun, and revels in that, endlessly remixing what has come before.
What is new is that the genre of media-as-artform conflates the emotional passage of a story with the playful act of creation – but then pretends surprise at the real-world effects, i.e. judicial bias, miscarriage of justice and destroyed lives. But isn't that part of what campaigning journalism is all about? Media by its very definition has long said 'I am but the messenger'. Deep into the information century, that messenger increasingly has life-altering power, and every side thinks it's on the right side of history.
The Victorian artisan William Morris, founder of the arts and crafts movement, said all art should be utilitarian, functional and attractive. This approach to art was co-opted by the British Socialists as they gained influence around the same time. Morris of course didn't know what a retreating mainstream media culture and 8 billion voices on X might mean, long into the future. A 'mere trinket' the artform of the media is very much not.
States of Independence: From Pop Art to Art Rock and Beyond available here https://www.amazon.co.uk/States-Independence-Pop-Rock-Beyond/dp/B0B3SWLQXT