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Conceptual framework: World
You can learn about “how interests in the world are represented in art (eg art as a representation of experience, class, ideology, age and events of significance).” You can also gain an understanding of the intentional and functional relations between world and artists, world and artworks, world and audiences.
Focus questions:
- Can you think of an instance where the world of the artist is very different to the world of the audience?
- When exhibitions tour, such as Art express, how do the different “worlds” of different audiences influence varying responses to the exhibition?
- Account for the changing worlds or contexts of Blue poles by Jackson Pollock and explain how the changing environment of an artwork can influence how it is understood.
WORLD can be evaluated critically or historically.
You can consider the world in the following ways:
- The artworld is part of the world at large.
- The world at large is a context in which events of significance occur.
- The world at large is constantly evolving and changing as a result of technological and scientific changes that often lead to societal change.
- Events of significance need to be researched as they impact on the artworld.
- The collective experience of a particular age or place can be experienced as world.
- The “subjective” world can be understood and experienced personally and psychologically by individual artists and discreet audiences.
- The world as a place for the existence of cultural beliefs, values, religions, rituals, ideas and concepts. The relationship of the cultural world and its artists and their artworks and audiences can be evaluated and can be thought of as the “cultural” world.
- The “material” world is the world of mass produced commodies, and ideas of the consumer culture.
- The virtual world is the world of digital imaging and its relationships to the material world and to reality.
- The “postmodern” world is a place of ambiquities and contradictions. There is no one way of looking at things and many interpretations or layers can coexist. This world contains uncertainies, ironies, parodies, humour. Power relations, disjunctions and hidden assumptions are challenged.
The artworld reflects these events of significance in the form of comment or challenge or interpretation. Socio-political aspects of a specific world need to be researched; ie class, power, dominance, minorities, ideologies. Experiences of the world need to be researched - these may be personal and private to the artist, or to his group, or be more generalised experiences of the culture. The artworld needs to be researched: art movements, styles, influences, hybridity, innovations, pressures. The artworld also includes the power-brokers, curators, historians, critics and collectors who form the audience. You should think about how to interpret both critical and historical accounts of the world.
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