Ludzie lubią obrazy...: studia o komercyjnej kulturze wizualnej i sztuce

Abstract

The book presents a look at commercial images by an art historian, who - like everyone who deals with visual arts - constantly encounters edge cases that are close to and often confused with art for various reasons. Undoubtedly, one of such edge cases is the imagery that forms the commercial visual culture, which is the main subject of the book. It is usually a marketing communication tool and its most obvious and visible ex ample is advertising. The considerations contained in the book are an attempt to recognize and understand the phenomenon of such images, as well as to examine the tension between them and art. This aim also indicates who are the addressees of the work: primarily researchers and art enthusiasts, as well as people interested in broadly understood imagery and issues of contemporary culture. The book is a testimony to the constant need to transcend the bounds of art history and theory, which results from the nature of commercial imagery. Therefore, it is situated on the border of art history and theory, visual studies, cultural studies, history and theory of culture, as well as cultural anthropology. The interdisciplinary nature of the work leads to obvious methodological problems. The concept of art based on Arthur Dant's theory, which is, nota bene, a reinterpretation of Kant's and Hegel's philosophy of art. The concept adopted in the book is based on the assumption that art is a space of a special type of reflection - on the subject of art itself, as well as on modern reality understood as the human environment. This perception of art has been legitimised by its understanding proposed primarily by artists representing the avant-garde movement in the first half of the 20th century. It is their art that the representatives of the first and second neo-avant-garde referred to in their works, thus vivisecting art as such or legitimizing the status of their own works as art. The second basis for the studies contained in the book is Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action, as well as his theory of culture, which is an extension of the critical theory of capitalism proposed by the representatives of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Based on Habermas's assumptions, we can view modern commercial visual culture as "mediatised" images, since they are tools for the medium of power and the medium of money. In the assumptions of the German philosopher, the dynamics of the functioning of these media led to the absorption of the world of life, the constitutive elements of which are language, which allows for the articulation of the images of reality and culture, understood as the human environment. The book is part of a series of reflections on the essence of the "pictorial turn" , which has been widely discussed in humanities since the 1990s. It is a voice in this discussion. It is also an attempt to elucidate the tensions between art and technology or – if we look at this problem more broadly - between culture and civilization. It is also an invitation to look at commercial visual culture from the perspective of its own history and, at the same time, art tradition. Moreover, the work elucidates the mechanics of commercial imagery, as well as presenting it in the context of selected concepts of culture that directly or indirectly relate to the problems of commercial imagery. Commercial images that are the subject of the book are of a particular nature, because in the public perception they are often considered to be somehow "debased". They do not serve contemplation or cognition, but are a tool of money-making and are treated in numerical terms - they have a strictly defined target and their task is to bring a calculated profit. Nowadays they are born on computer screens and their primary building blocks are pixels. They are generally seen as an extremely effective tool for the economy to destroy the space of contemplation, which has been turned into a space of economic calculation. They serve to transform the world into some pictorial façade, constantly telling a story about a future that will never come and creating a visual sphere that not only obscures any deep understanding of reality, but also denatures it, becoming an autonomous simulation space. It is supposed to illustrate and at the same time glorify the Paradise of mass consumerism and technology in service of convenience and practieality. The images that make up the commercial visual sphere are therefore a testimony to a particular kind of iconocIasm - being an obvious element of modern everyday life, they cancel themselves out as im ages, which makes the line between visual façade and the reality of everyday life increasingly blurry. Contrary to appearances, the visual culture analysed here is not something chaotic, because most of its manifestations can be as signed to one of the areas of marketing, such as advertising, public relations, sales marketing, along with industrial design, as well as such tools as visual merchandising, sales promotion media, and various forms of marketing communication on the Internet, with contextual advertising at the forefront. It seems, however, that it is difficult to take seriously and thus reflect on, for example, a press advertisement praising the remarkable effectiveness of an anti-dandruff shampoo or washing powder. One risks becoming entangled in the lowest forms of popular culture and the worst kind of kitsch. However, these images are extremely important, because they allowed for the dynamic development and expansion of capitalism in its first phase, known as industrial capitalism, focused on the continuous intensification of production and, consequentIy, also sales. They became the primary tool of the transformation, in 1920'S America, from a culture of needs to a culture of desires, i.e. a culture of mass consumerism, the patterns of which spread widely around the world, proving to be an important basis for globalization. They also underpin the latest form of digital capitalism, which Shoshana Zuboff has called surveillance capitalism: The book is a reaction to the confusion around art, which is very visible, among others, in popular opinions, which often reflect the view that advertising, for example, like the world of fashion, hair-dressing, tattooing, or make-up, is a manifestation of "real" art. One can also often encounter the opinion that art is whatever anyone thinks is art. Such an assumption - legitimate in its own way and therefore acceptable - may, nevertheless, lead to complete axiological freedom resulting in the negation of the idea that the existence of the entire discursive field of art perceived from not just an academic perspective is in any way meaningful. The book is a collection of related essays, one of the main goals of which is to try to defend the former division between applied and liberal arts, thus to identify the schism between art and technical images generally serving commercial purposes. A division into technical paintings and art may probably seem risky and therefore debatable. Artists have always used technology, but it should be noted that in their works they did not turn only to it and, with this in mind, we can insist on the existence of obvious distinctions be tween these fields. Thus, if the author of this book fails to convince the reader that such a division exists, there is at least hope that they might be left in a state of uncertainty. At this point, to conclude, one can invoke the well-known statement by Zygmunt Bauman, some times treated as his intellectual creed: "the only certainty is the wisdom of uncertainty" . This work, therefore, proposes that commercial images should be treated as products of the field of technical design, just as it clearly includes industrial design. The author of the book agrees with the opinion of Otl Aicher, a well-known design practitioner and theorist, one of the co-founders of the legendary Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, who stated that design has nothing to do with art and that it should be justified by science and technology. In his opinion, technology has its own technical beauty, but it can not be said that the opposite is true, that art has a technological dimension. Aicher believed that the designer's job was not to introduce art into everyday life, but to create a new industrial culture. He stipulated that artistry does not help with goal-oriented design. It only gets in the way. FoIIowing Aicher's remarks, the author of this book proposes to treat commercial visual culture as a field of applied arts, such as, for example, the aforementioned industrial design, applied graphics, or architecture. They undoubtedly require incredible talent and creativity, but their tasks are nevertheless quite different from those that have rang been associated with art. Design serves to solve problems, while art is a field of refIection that serves cognition.