But lately, I've been visiting very diverse art events. Some might call it high or low culture or maybe some of it is stuffy or relaxed. I don't know what it is, but I think that these two types of events just have different audiences. Two photos as examples:
The top is the 4th floor of the Harvard Art museum. Wonderfully filled installation with a solid showing of art from around 1870/1880. Historically important and vital to understanding art history.
The bottom is from the final party/performances at MEME in Cambridge. A bunch of drunken fools playing kazoos and laughing as they improvise music at the behest of the conductor (the blur in the middle).
Are these the poles that people in universities use as high and low? No. They would certainly define a painting from Harvard's collection as high, sure, but they would likely use lady gaga or some advertising spread as the painting's opposite. This low-brow-as-advertising crap has been encouraged deeply by Roland Barthes (pdf). Barthes is an inescapable corner stone of art theory eduction (with Sculpture in the Expanded Field and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as at least two of the other corners).
Low-art is usually described as advertising partially because of Barthes' analysis of static advertising images. It becomes most clear when you consider this: if you asked the supposed commoner who decides such things, is The Hangover from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or is MEME's improv "real art?"
My assumption is that your average person would say that T-L is real art and the improvised music is not real art.
The T-L is easier to read as art, like the advertising spread. From the content to the handling of the paint, this is a great example of how we have been taught that hand-made abstractions are the definition of art. It's also easier to "skim off" the semiotics of what the painting is trying to do. The white wall, the silence, the paying money to get in, the frame, the guards, the space around each work, the wall text announcing the provenance and the official statistics. These are as clear as the pasta advertising's attempt at reading Italian. The culture of high art museums is showing how cultured each work is through the semiotics of the presentation.
This is not evident in MEME's event. Instead the linguistic, coded and non-coded iconic messages are ambiguous. What are we being directed to think in this situation? Is this just a good party? Are nerds like me supposed to remember this event and write about it to anchor it in art history? To use Barthes' ideas for a moment, there is an arbitrariness here that is absent from a museum presentation. The frankness of the image is incomplete at MEME. The "what it is" non-coded message is just a bunch of people having fun. Is that art now?
So Barthes' brand of decoding static images is a bad method to explore what was happening at MEME that night. I think that the "message in the medium" is that performance is something that is not static and functions outside the rules of advertising. I think that low-art, low-brow, whatever you want to call it is best used to look at things like advertising, pop art, graffiti, comic books, or graphic design. Barthes' brand of semiotics is not a universally applicable tool in art.
If people want to continue arguing about the cultured qualities of The Hangover and The Hangover, let them, but if you tell me that a party atmosphere can't be art, then we are going to have to find another reason why besides it's "lowbrow."
I'm sure that someone wants to argue that it's neither: it's avant-garde. Can relaxed performance be ahead of the curve in 2011? Nope. In the 1960's, maybe. Why can't the two just have different audiences that are social equals? Why does everything in art theory have to encourage political divisions?
