Vytautas Kavolis
Artistic Expression—A Sociological Analysis
(1968)
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ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
AND PURITANISM
Abstract expressionism, the imageless, energetic style of painting represented by Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, is one of the few modern styles completely without analogues in any of the civilizations of the past. It has emerged in the only industrialized civilization in history. The partial correlation between abstract expressionism and an advanced stage of industrialization suggests that an economic determinant may have been important in the emergence of this style of painting. Our purpose will be to show that industrialism is inadequate, even on the level of sociological analysis, as an explanation of the abstract expressionist style.
...
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Modern science, which is one of the components of industrial civilization sufficiently powerful to have influenced styles of artistic expression, seems to be most congruent with the analytical styles, such as cubism and Mondrian's neo-plasticism. Psychoanalysis, as one artistically influential branch of modern science, has its most direct artistic expression in the surrealist school of painting. But both the orderliness of science and the concreteness, even though frequently speculative, of psychoanalysis are absent in abstract expressionism.
I mean...who's to say what's orderly or what's concrete ?
It seems untenable to explain the identifying features of abstract expressionism by the political system under which it has emerged. Historically, this style of art was entirely foreign to preindustrial democracies. Substantively, there are few significant common themes that connect democracy as a form of political organization with the abstract expressionist style of painting.
Hmm. I don't agree at all . Representationalism means the loss of a certain amount of control over the composition and dissemination of one's own image. When images are the coin of the realm, the "democratization" of creativity just fans the flames of an imagistic war of all against all, rooted in and recapitulating all of the most notorious uses of entrenched power. The abstract expressionist style of painting cannot meet everyone's needs of "expression," certainly, but for those it does meet, it avoids creating the conflict of rights that arises in imagistic culture, where we are all reduced to each others' raw material. And if someone thinks they see violence or racism or ideological slant in a pile of mangled wire or few dollops of paint, let them try to find a non-projective, non-dissociative, non-animistic way of explaining why. And if someone notices, say, that a photographer who didn't ask permission to take pictures now insists on being asked permission to use those pictures and credited for them at all times, have the parties explain themselves face-to-face in the manner of the now-idealized Town Hall Meeting rather than in the manner of the McLuhanized internet. Not that this will ever happen, but if it did I think more than a few sociologists-of-art would quickly become ensconced in some hurried revision, and also we'd put a lot of antisocial art-behavior to bed rather quietly.
Similarly, abstract expressionism cannot be correlated with one of the presumed sociological by-products of industrialization, the mass society. As William Kornhauser has shown, the structural characteristics of a mass society are more evident in France and Germany than in Britain or the United States. Yet it is in the last country that abstract expressionism emerged and immediately became popular, to the point of affectation.
Hmm. Was it ever really popular?
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Again, theories which have associated form distortion with anxiety seem to be applicable, without modification, only to the art styles that retain substantive forms to be distorted. Psychological hypotheses accounting for abstract style in terms of the alienation of the artist from society or his maladjustment seem to have more direct bearing on abstract expressionism. Yet this approach does not explain the radicalism of the complete exclusion of all tangible "forms of flesh." Neither is it capable of accounting for the great appeal of abstract expressionism in the American society, which has never been shown by any responsible social scientist to contain more maladjustment than any other comparable industrial society.
At the risk of beating a dead horse...
Really, truly, I'm just not interested in this particular scavenger hunt for ironclad social determinants of style. But sure, we do have to reckon with the radicalism of the complete exclusion of all tangible "forms of flesh" and other such things. On one level such talk of "exclusion" gives the game away: someone has to be, in the first place, expecting flesh in order for it to be felt as excluded. We would not talk of the "exclusion" of the hexatonic scale from a pop song or the "exclusion" of the Shakespearean comic relief episode from a TV docudrama. Those probably are not relevant facts, but they are facts and they could, just maybe, become relevant later. But why and how would they become relevant?
I don't know if this is a valid leap, but I think of "The Frame Problem" here. Once this can of worms is open vis-a-vis an artwork, all of our initial frames around technique, aesthetics, artist's intention, etc. can suddenly evaporate. I'm sure we can find explicit statements, somewhere, by founding Abexers about precisely this "exclusion," but that does not seem to be Kavolis' "frame" here. It is in the nature of his inquiry, i.e. in its "sociological" rather than "psychological" or (ahem) "technical" or "aesthetic" nature, that there are no "sleeping dogs."
So, I say as someone to whom the "exclusion of the flesh" from certain sorts of "abstract" artworks has, rather improbably, become a central concern both intellectually and practically, the dirty little secret of such "concerns" as mine is that they are essentially products of the Salience Heuristic and not absolute pronouncements. Other things which are typically "excluded" from Abex are, say, typography, vaccines, the sound of the harmonica,... I personally find those exclusions un-salient whereas the flesh-exclusion I find tremendously salient. In my world I think I can make a good case for this as an issue of general concern. But if in your world "art" does not typically include "flesh" in the first place, you will not have the same frame around all of this as I do, and so you may be unconvinced.
This merely to say: we can make (and Kavolis does make) both affirmative and negative statements re: social determinants of style; we can make these two types of statement in very nearly the same linguistic form; but they require vastly different forms of evidential support. It's a problem of Talebian scope which, unfortunately, art theorists only seem to know how to handle in Seussian fashion.
...
It may be suggested that abstract expressionism became the most powerful art form of the most advanced industrial society, not because it in some mysterious way reflects the functioning of industrial society, but because it articulates with value orientations which have been highly influential in the emergence of modern civilization and which are still dominant in contemporary American culture.
So, Abex
articulates with value orientations
which are still dominant in contemporary American culture
,
yet
there are few significant common themes
that connect democracy as a form of political organization
with the abstract expressionist style of painting
?
I guess those are, technically, two different things.
In the first place, certain basic value orientations of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are not only favorable to, but in fact, may have been necessary for, the emergence of a style with the characteristics of abstract expressionism. Talcott Parsons has underlined two such value orientations that have had particular importance in shaping the secular content of
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Western civilization. The first is universalism. "Neither ideas nor morality," under this principle, "can be relative to the particular time and place and social group." And now abstract expressionism has become the first style of art that, in principle, can be "as true for the 'heathen Chinese' as . . . for any Christian group."
Ugh. I mean, sure, I kind of think so. But why true ? Is that the best we can do?
Ultimately I do think we have to find the right "frame" vis-a-vis inclusions and exclusions, e.g., as above. That's not the wrong tactic, it's just really fucking hard to see it through. It's the "truth" which "has only one garment and one road and is always at a disadvantage." But that one truth cannot possibly play the same for everyone. And anyway, I think that kind of uniformity is not (I hope it is not) the aim of universalism per se.
It has acquired this capacity for universality not only by virtue of its radical detachment from the conditions and traditions of any particular "time or place or social group,"
Uh...
The whole book
is
a wild goose chase
after
the nexus of artworks
with broader
conditions and traditions
??
but also because of its equally radical individualism, the insistence on unlimited self-expression as the only relevant goal of art. The relation, to paraphrase Parsons, of this artistic principle to the conception that "each human being has an immortal soul, all of the same religious worth, ... is patent." The individualistic universalism of the Judaeo-Christian tradition may also be one of the roots of the secular "cult of originality."
Unlimited self-expression
?!
All
limits lifted
?!
Or just certain limits
which certain people
for certain reasons
have sought to impose
??
I say even as a diehard abstractionist myself
that
most people find the possibilities for "self-expression" here
to be
slim-to-none.
And that's okay!
The other main element of the Judaeo-Christian tradition which Parsons emphasizes is activism. This "means essentially that man's goals and values are conceived not primarily as concerned with adaptation to or escape from a given set of physical and social conditions, but with the mastery over them." It may be argued that the creation of an entirely "new nature" out of "inner rhythms" is not only, as Margaret Mead suggests, "a blessed expedient, imaginatively devised, for the present human emergency," but also the most radical attempt at an artistic conquest of, and mastery over, nature. The "dynamic pattern" of the majority of abstract paintings is a specific formal reflection of the activistic orientation. Activism may also be perceived in the energy—or "motor violence"—with which the means of expression are manipulated by most of the abstract expressionists.
More plausible, at least, but perhaps too much so. i.e. Rank and Becker might question whether this particular need for mastery is really so unique. It undoubtedly has a causa-sui element.
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As a second, and more specific, hypothesis, it is suggested that the branch of the Christian tradition which has most strongly emphasized orientations toward individualistic universalism and activism—namely, Puritanism—has produced motivations particularly favorable to the emergence of a style with the characteristics of abstract expressionism.
Several identifying features of abstract expressionism can be meaningfully related to significant aspects of the Puritan mentality. The radical elimination (going beyond the Judaic prohibition of graven images) of all visible nature as the subject matter of artistic expression is congruent with the Puritan "repudiation of all idolatry of the flesh." A reconciliation of this moral principle—which has been thought to be "absolutely opposed" to artistic expression—with an emergent aesthetic interest requires either an "uglification" of the flesh in its various forms or its rejection as subject matter. Both courses have been taken in American art; the first tendency appears to be stronger in literature, and the second in painting. Although tendencies toward ugliness have been discerned in the form and color preferences of leading abstract expressionists, the abolition of content has made it possible not only to reconcile an underlying moral attitude with an emergent artistic interest, but also to do this without obvious distortion of tangible reality—namely, by renouncing the latter.
A renunciation of tangible reality, rather than its "uglification" is, in fact, more consistent with the Puritan campaign against "the dependence on external things." Protest art—and paintings in the tradition of figurative expressionism may be included here—is still dependent, although negatively, on "external things," against the falsity or futility of which it protests. But abstract art, which has achieved
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independence from "external things," is in this respect characterized by a more radical adherence to the very abstract moral principle of Puritanism. It is important that not only human subject matter is excluded—which could be accounted for by a neutral conception of human nature—but all tangible subject matter as well.
Given this renunciation of tangible nature to which all abstractionists are committed, the "powerful spiritualization" which was one by-product of the Reformation—the "Protestant subjectivity" evident in Rembrandt's work
Ugh. Norman O. Brown writes contemptuously of "Protestant literalism." Which will it be, guys?
and the "greatest inward emotion," which he himself described as his goal—can be a source of much of the nonmagical (as contrasted, for example, to Miro's) imaginativeness of American abstract expressionists. Weber's paraphrase of Washington Irving, to the effect that Puritanism, precisely because of its ascetic restraint, "evinces less play of fancy, but more power of the imagination," applies well to the painters of the abstract expressionist school. Ascetic (i.e., nonpleasurable) spontaneity, found in some of the less middle-class Protestant movements, is also the basic psychological attitude of the abstract expressionists. We may suggest that abstract expressionism has been favored by the "debourgeoisification" of Puritanism.
The uncertainty of salvation, of which Weber made so much in his discussion of the Puritan motivation toward capitalism, is comparable to the state of mind which seems to be the source of much of the tension—and emotional energy—in the work of the originators of abstract expressionism. "The self-image" which Jackson Pollock's paintings, for example, have suggested to one observer is "that of the storm-tossed sailor seeking the still center of the hurricane" —a generalized pilgrim's progress.
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When combined with the intensity of this search, the massive reliance on chance effects in the action-painting school takes on the meaning, on the subconscious level, of a latter-day attempt to test the hidden verdict of predestination. Those who have been predestined to be "saved" will perform well, if they work conscientiously at their calling, even when they abandon conscious control. In fact, the abandonment of conscious control may be the most radical test of the state of grace, or of its absence.
Finally, the analogy may be stressed between the Puritan revolt against established tradition and "the Abstract Expressionists' renunciation of traditional authority": abstract expressionism is a "form of painting which is motivated by a spirit of revolt, ... a style whose most profound commitment is to remain disaffected . . . from style itself." "Expressionism," in general, "is the art of the individual and of his protest against the restraints of society"—a protest also represented by the original Reformation.
Frames again. With time, other frames become relevant. Contrary to the radical social construcivist line, I think this passage of time and the constant creation of new "context" is where the real action is. But the real bugaboo of course is not actually "social constructivism," even though that's the typical cover story. The place where primates really can't seem to get out of their own way, rather, is in hanging the old frames around the neck of the artwork like a scarlet letter and then marching it around the village to be serially shamed by the other primate villagers. Sure, you could argue that the very notion of painting in the style of Jorn in 2024 has more than a hint of protest to it no matter how you slice it, but even so it cannot possibly be a 1950s protest. At some point (probably very quickly, actually, as the social constructivists themselves would have it) not only does it become possible for drip-painting, e.g., to become motivated by emotions which were not exactly (or not anything) like those of the pioneers, it may even become im-possible for it to be motivated in the old ways. This of course won't stop any bourgeois quietists from talking one moment like its 1948 and the next like its 2048, but that is just how people are.
The Protestant idea that everyone can worship God directly is congruent with the assumption (which became attached to abstract expressionism as a socioartistic movement) that everyone can paint, without art-school training, for self-expression.
Indeed! But the more important part (or at least it is more important so long as more people will view paintings than will paint themselves) is that everyone can perform for themselves the functions which were previously thought to necessitate formal criticism. A painting is the creation, not the creator.
If you find the ideal love and try to make it the sole judge of good and bad in yourself, the measure of your strivings, you become simply the reflex of another person. You lose yourself in the other, just as obedient children lose themselves in the family. No wonder that dependency, whether of the god or the slave in the relationship, carries with it so much underlying resentment. ... No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood, and the attempt has to take its toll in some way on both parties. The reasons are not far to seek. The thing that makes God the perfect spiritual object is precisely that he is abstract—as Hegel saw. He is not a concrete individuality, and so He does not limit our development by His own personal will and needs. When we look for the "perfect" human object we are looking for someone who allows us to express our will completely, without any frustration or false notes. We want an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. But no human object can do this;...
(Becker, The Denial of Death, p. 166)
Pretty risky to bring this into it, since this passage deploys "abstract" in a separate usage which risks sowing confusion! But I can't help but think here of this need for a "spiritual object" which is "abstract" rather than "human," because I think that is the necessary companion metaphor to Kavolis' suggestion of Abexers as worshipping God directly . A "direct" line to a human object is just another kind of papistry.
Thus, within the general framework of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Puritanism has emphasized certain elements which, even though they may not have been its immediate inspiration, are congruent with some of the most significant features of abstract expressionism. It is notable that abstract expressionism was developed in the one advanced industrial society which was probably most influenced by Puritanism.
While the romantic tradition intervened to modify the impact of the secularized value orientations of Puritanism on
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abstract expressionist art (and may be responsible for its more sensuous features), enough evidence has been presented to support the hypothesis that, in one of its sociological aspects, abstract expressionism can be seen as a phase of the working-out of the effects of Puritanism on Western civilization.
I conceive of abstract expressionism as an art style supplied with much of its motivation by a secularized Puritan tradition that has been reconciled with a growing artistic interest and reactivated by a new, but nonspecific and non-denominational, religious urgency.
It may be suggested that it is because of the congruence of some of the basic value orientations forged by Puritanism and abstract expressionism that the latter became the first domestically produced art style which both generated intense and widespread interest in the American society and brought forth the first internationally significant artistic expression of American society. It also contributed to a reconciliation of the still largely puritan, although secularized, dominant stream of American culture with art. It was a creative achievement, of the first order, not only as a form of artistic expression, but also as a focus of sociocultural integration.
Praise be to the "abstract" god sociocultural integration !
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SOCIAL EVOLUTION
AND MODERN STYLES
If sociocultural conditions can be assumed to affect artistic expression, the main directions of social evolution should also be reflected (through changes in the fantasy dispositions which they cause) in identifiable linear trends in the development of art styles. To be sure, the general direction of social evolution can be reversed in the history of any specific society or civilization. Therefore, artistic trends presumably associated with social evolution cannot be expected to be continuous within any particular society. But if social evolution does affect artistic expression, several relatively continuous directional changes in style should become evident upon comparison of the main identifiable stages of the evolutionary process; and they should be most pronounced in periods of the most rapid evolutionary change. ...
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...
The methodology used in this chapter differs somewhat from that employed earlier. It consists partly of extremely general observations on the directions of art development in the evolutionary sequence extending from the hunting, through the agricultural and commercial, to the industrial societies. But the main methodological device employed here consists of an attempt to demonstrate that certain empirically observable tendencies in contemporary art can be meaningfully related to the most general trends in the evolution of human society and culture. The reason why such trends are more visible in modern than in earlier styles is that social evolution, having become greatly accelerated, is itself far more visible and more likely to impress itself on the artistic imagination than it was in the past. While this methodology is highly speculative (and the generalizations to be presented need to be modified by referring to the more factual data adduced earlier), it permits the making of predictions which it may be possible to test when future developments in art style have made themselves evident.
Yeah, see...I guess I thought the concept of science is that we test them now? If we're just going to wait for time to give us the answer, then why bother making predictions ?
Pratt remarks that the fields of molecular biology and high-energy physics are making headline discoveries at a fast rate, not because of the richness of the areas or of the diligency of the scientists, but because those involved have learned to provide alternative hypotheses, to devise crucial experiments, and to do so expeditiously with clear results. Nowhere is there a simple deduction which is tested, as is the case in numerous papers published currently in psychological and sociological journals. Instead, there are alternatives and crucial experiments performed almost in one day, which set out not so much to prove hypotheses as to disprove them. Pratt calls the method one of multiple hypotheses, contrasting it with current procedures which he derides as "The Eternal Surveyor," "The Never Finished," or "The Frozen Method." He reminds us that Roentgen, eight weeks after discovering X-rays, had identified seventeen of their major properties, one experiment rapidly following another.
(Stephenson, The Play Theory of Mass Communication,
1987 edition [orig. 1967], pp. 129-130)
One of the most obvious aspects of social evolution is man's increasing mastery over the forces of nature. In periods when radical increases in mastery are occurring, art styles tend toward geometricism. But in the past radical increases have occurred only in a few epochs, not continuously.
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(Whether this will be so under modern technology is another question.) While geometricism is therefore one of the style characteristics that submerge and re-emerge, the increase (though at differing rates) in man's mastery over nature from one evolutionary stage to another should be reflected in a similar increase in the tendency for man to impose a pattern of his own making, an artificial order, on the objects (whether naturalistic or not) depicted in his art.
...
Art style is also likely to reflect the types of action of the specific forces by means of which man attempts, in any given stage of social evolution, to master nature. Thus slow, organic, rhythmic, and clearly delimited action—characteristic of the work of men, animals, and plants—tends to be suggested in the styles created between the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. Explosively dynamic, mechanically rigid, arbitrarily designed types of action—characteristic of atomic fission, machines, laboratory reactions—are more frequently suggested in the styles of the industrial epoch. The relative prevalence of these formal characteristics in art depends, however, on whether artists emotionally identify with, or reject the whole process of, industrialization.
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A second general evolutionary trend, with exceedingly numerous ramifications, is the movement toward greater functional differentiation within the social order. This trend should, first of all, be reflected in increased complexity in art styles. However, once society becomes so complex that the whole of it cannot be encompassed within any given artistic synthesis (or perceived by the artist from his vantage point as an integrated whole), it is likely that artistic complexity, instead of continuing to increase within the individual work of art, will either be expressed in an increased differentiation among works of art, resulting in the formation of diverse but concurrently developing styles, or will focus on the sense of the fragmentary and of the incomprehensibility of the whole.
We do have the concurrently developing styles , certainly, but there also seem to be some powerful forces pushing against increased differentiation in favor of "dedifferentiation."
...
One central dimension of the evolutionary trend toward differentiation is the increasing functional autonomy of basic subsystems within the sociocultural order. ...the increasing disjunction of culture from social structure (which becomes pronounced only in mature urban, especially in advanced industrial, societies) means that cultural images, in such societies, are less closely tied upwith the objective conditions of social life and less insistently "tested" by constant application to them.
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... The detachment of culture from social structure results in the liberation of the creative imagination and, on the other hand, in an increasing irrelevance of culture to social life. The irrelevance of culture to society is then likely to be subjectively perceived as the "meaninglessness" or "absurdity" of the existence of the culture creator—thus, by him, of existence itself.
...
The other aspect of the general process of differentiation among the subsystems of the sociocultural order that is of relevance here is the increasing differentiation of art from other cultural systems, especially religion (with which it has been particularly closely aligned at earlier evolutionary levels). This trend has the effect of emancipating art from the need to represent the symbolic content of other cultural systems and, consequently, frees it for a preoccupation with what is peculiarly its own—namely, the life of forms (which become increasingly independent of content). As a consequence, art style becomes at the same time less symbolic and more purely formalistic.
One could only hope! But in religion's wake, the cultural system commerce seems to have preoccupied more and more artists over the years.
Also, as Rank said,
the artist is under a sort of organic compulsion to transform his art-ideology into experience.
And so now that "everyone" is an "artist," the preeminent art form is a de-differentiated "mass self-communication."
older media effects theories...are often rooted in a reception model, that is, in the notion that certain properties of media or technologies...have a unidirectional impact on recipients. ... However... Long before the advent of Web 2.0, observers noted that media users had become producers as well as consumers of information and entertainment, a phenomenon for which the now somewhat obsolete term prosumers was coined... This implies that...technology not only provides users a fast and easily accessible vehicle for interpersonal transactions, but also an increased opportunity for intrapersonal transactions, that is, transactions within the senders (and recipients) themselves. In other words, the production and distribution of content by a sender may not only affect its recipient(s), but also the sender him or herself. This phenomenon, that our own beliefs and our own behavior exert influence on ourselves, has been recently referred to as an expression effect...
(Valkenburg, Peter, and Walther, "Media Effects: Theory and Research" (2016), pp. 28-29)
...
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... It seems that, so long as the strictly specialized artist is not re-enforced in his theoretically expectable tendency toward aesthetic formalism by a social environment specializing in the artistic enterprise, he is not capable of developing a completely formalistic style—that is, one in which the form of expression has an indubitable priority over content (to the point that the latter can be abandoned if not required by the chosen mode of expression).
Well, people have different needs and non-needs of re-enforcement, no?
The increasing role differentiation in the public (especially the economic) sector of society, of which specialization within the artistic enterprise is one element, has the general consequence that the "inner self" can no longer be fully engaged in roles of narrowly defined specificity.
Maybe that's why we developed "mass self-communication" as a compensation?
The public sector therefore, with its universalistic definition of roles and its task orientation, is experienced as ego-alien. To be sure, the trend toward alienation from the formally organized components of society is potentially compensated by more intense involvements with the private, spontaneously emergent elements of social existence which constitute its "intimacy structure," where roles are uniquely defined to fit personality characteristics and a "social-emotional" orientation prevails. ...
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...insofar as he does have roles in the intimacy structures, the art created (or preferred) by him is likely to suggest that the publicly visible is psychologically alien and the privately experienced alone has emotional significance (in contrast, for example, to Renaissance art). Styles produced under this influence should tend toward forms of expression that appear, from an outsider's point of view, hermetic.
It seems possible to suggest a more specific hypothesis: The tendency to counterbalance the advancing bureaucratization of public life by an increased stress on highly personalized emotion and on the intimacy structures of private life will be reflected in art in periodic waves of intense expressionism and through the infiltration of fragmentary reflections of the artist's intimacy structures—not for their own sake (as in medieval religious or in consciously nationalistic art), but as gestures toward the establishment of an individual identity.
It may be worth noting that while roles in the public sector, in the course of bureaucratization, are defined with increasing precision, the private sector is characterized by a trend toward attenuation of the dividing lines (e.g., between the roles of men and women, the old and the young), a blurring of the boundaries, an open-endedness and overlapping between systems that have been traditionally more sharply defined. Whatever is clearly defined is therefore ego-alien, and whatever is emotionally significant is ambiguous. It might be expected that in modern styles a clear definition of an object will be tantamount to its emotional rejection, and an ambiguous statement indicative of emotional involvement.
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Increasing role differentiation may further result in such an expansion of the total role repertoire of an individual that, if he takes most of his roles seriously, a sense of the self as a relatively consistent and uniquely identifiable point of reference for his own behavior may become difficult to experience. The peculiarly modern phenomenon of "loss of the self" may be caused in part by role inundation, in part by the expanded awareness both of cultural diversity and of the subconscious levels of one's own personality, and in part by the rapidity of social change which prevents the personality from getting set in any definite mold. However it may be caused, the decline of the sense of the self seems to be reflected in art style by a preference for impersonal and anonymous forms and the more impersonal materials and techniques (including the production of art by machines rather than directly by the human hand).
This is Lasch's "Minimal Self" theory almost to the letter. But this moment of preference for impersonal and anonymous forms does not seem to have lasted for very long even as the above-named social trends have intensified. (And of course this anonymous quality is how a "puritan" self arrogates, not how it disintegrates. You'd better know/what who you're dealing with!)
...
The arts themselves have tended to become increasingly differentiated from each other.
Uh,...
So have aspects of the same art—style, depictive content, symbolic significance, technique. But in social evolution, trends toward an increase in functional differentiation are frequently accompanied by a counterbalancing trend toward an increased scope of social integration.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Elements which have acquired autonomy from
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each other are brought together in an interactive relationship of an ever-expanding scope, without losing their independence. In art style, this trend is perhaps most clearly reflected in the various continuing attempts at a "synthesis of the arts" and in the incorporation into art of elements of new productive technologies.
It must be pointed out that the integration of what has been previously differentiated is not a spontaneous synthesis, but a self-conscious articulation of elements, apt to appear somewhat "artificial" in its effects.
Well yeah, I think so!
...
A third evolutionary trend, a direct consequence of increases in mastery over nature, in functional differentiation, and in the scope of integration, is toward an increase in the size of the population contained within the relatively self-sufficient societies. Population growth within a society means that power is exercised on a larger scale—that is, over more people—and probably in a more centralized manner. The
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increase in the scale of power is psychologically congruent with a trend toward monumental forms of art, the increase in the number of people with the experience of the repetitiveness of men. Therefore a sharp increase in population within a social order seems likely to cause a fantasy pre-occupation with large dimensions and repeated forms, a trend evident in the preindustrial empires as well.
The record of these empires, however, also suggests that a large population is not in itself a depersonalizing influence. While imposing a superordinate political structure, the traditional empires tended to retain most of the locally diversified community and cultural structures, with a limited degree of internal differentiation within each community. This generally precluded the emergence of the "mass society" characteristic of fully bureaucratized industrial civilizations. Therefore the art styles of the ancient empires, while tending toward large dimensions and repetitiveness, were less impersonal than some modern styles.
An evolutionary trend that has been put into action by the Industrial Revolution is a movement toward populism—that is, an increasing participation of the masses (more precisely, of the lower middle and upper lower classes) in national life, their growing awareness of and responsiveness to political decision-making and cultural trend-setting in the capital cities. While this tendency does not necessarily mean that the masses are acquiring greater "real" power, it may yet be expected to increase artistic preoccupation with the "ordinary" and the "commonplace"—reflected in content, style, and the choice of materials. This preoccupation may, however, be somewhat counterbalanced by the effects on fantasy dispositions of the rapidly accumulating wealth of advanced industrial societies. One possible reconciliation of populism
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with wealth is the use of "commonplace," even trivial content expensively presented (on a large scale and in a spectacular manner). To be sure, this is less likely in avant-garde art, if only because less wealth has so far been available to its creators.
The trend toward populism is also likely to cause a general expansion of art audiences and to make popular (usually middle-level rather than proletarian) tastes more important in determining art trends. The greater importance of popular taste has as one of its consequences the attenuation of the dividing line between art (in the refined sense) and "nonart." This will probably increase the uncertainty of the artist—who is no longer oriented to an established elite whose taste he regards as a legitimate standard, but to a large and fickle public with no secure sense of artistic standards or indeed of its own taste. The artist is likely to overreact to his uncertainty by a combativeness and stridency, by a disposition toward extremes that will be reflected in his style.
An effective trend toward populism presupposes an educational upgrading of the population. The effects of an educational upgrading of the art public can be expected to some degree to offset those of their expansion—as far as the demand for quality and ability to judge it is concerned. In artistic expression, rising educational levels could re-enforce tendencies toward the problematic, allusive, nonutilitarian, and abstract.
A sixth evolutionary trend is toward an increase in contacts among differing cultural traditions. ...
[187]
... This evolutionary trend is likely to interact with the trend toward increased internal functional differentiation in promoting diversity in art style. But its most striking effect is apt to be an attenuation of inherited certitudes and the resulting (perhaps temporary) tendency toward ambiguity, inconsistency, relativity, and a sense of the accidental and the incomprehensible.
On the other hand, the growing awareness of the relativity of cultures is also likely to stimulate a search for "cultural universals," that is, basic patterns that are not bound to any particular time and place. In a world grown conscious of the relativity of all specific ways of life, cultural universals remain the only convincing basis of certainty. Both abstract art, in its lack of references to any specific historical environment, and some varieties of pop art, in their exploitation of a type of content which modern mass media of communication have made universal, constitute exemplifications of the tendency to seek universal patterns.
I'm really not so sure that's what it's all about. See prior comments.
(An alternative to abstractionism in the search for universals is a focusing on the simplest elements of human situations and environments, which are likely to be the most repetitive.)
Indeed. But is that really what we need "art" for?
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[188]
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Finally, the acceleration of sociocultural change, while not an irreversible trend, has tended nevertheless to be associated with social evolution. In the twentieth century, this acceleration has created a widespread perception of change as "authentic" and of stability as a structural rigidity artificially restraining the forces of change. "The central trend in this complex process is the decline of the belief in the stable, objective and permanent character of the external world." Consequently, "space is no longer visualized as a static container of things, but rather as a 'field of innumerable forces' in which things are permanently created and recreated in their form and significance."
While this perception is more widely present in the artistic (as well as the intellectual) elites than in the general public, it is these elites who create, interpret, and institutionalize artistic innovations; art style is therefore likely to reflect their subjective response to the acceleration of sociocultural change (and perhaps to popularize this response among the viewers of modern art). One artistic response to the increasing newness of social tasks is a preoccupation with innovation in artistic expression, and a tendency to reject its earlier forms (no matter how recent) as no longer "alive." This is the only evolutionary trend that can conceivably, with the stabilization of advanced industrial societies, be reversed through normal (as contrasted with catastrophic) social processes.
[189]
The emergent characteristics that are peculiar to modern art and not shared by it with the styles of any other epoch can be best understood as more or less faithful reflections
UGH...
of the fantasy dispositions shaped by the processes of social evolution and by the development of the new evolutionary factors associated with industrialization. Evolutionary trends are likely to be significantly reflected in art style only when they reach a certain point or occur at a particular rate of speed. The greater the speed at which evolutionary changes occur, the more likely they are to impress themselves upon fantasy dispositions, and therefore to be reflected in art styles. Thus, while evolutionary factors have presumably affected art styles at all times, they are of particular influence in twentieth-century art. Modern art as a whole may indeed have been more influenced by the diverse experiences of, and reactions to, the recently accelerated evolutionary change than by any other sociocultural variable. Other variables, especially cultural orientations, seem to have been important mainly as determinants of subjective responses to the massive fact of social evolution.
Insofar, however, as subjective responses to social evolution constitute the definition of its human meaning, the arts continue to have a vital social function—not simply in reflecting or influencing particular sociocultural conditions, but in interpreting (and thus perhaps determining) the human meaning of social evolution.
[242 (endnotes)] 31. Viewed as a diagnosis of existing conditions, Marxism can be felt to be dualistic. In the diachronic view, however, because it offers absolute assurance of an ultimately harmonious solution, Marxism may suggest a relatively harmonious image of the universe. Its effects on art style should depend on whether the primary orientation of the artist or his public is to its contemporary or its Utopian implications.
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[252] In the short run, Marxism represents a very dynamic mastery orientation. But, in the long run, Marxism regards man as an instrument of historical change, which in turn is merely one of the inexorable processes of nature. Therefore, ultimately, man is subjugated to nature. The effects of Marxism on art style might depend on which aspect, man as master or man as tool, is regarded as relevant. In either case, however, a harmony-with-nature orientation is alien to Marxism.
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