Disengaged Territories

Abstract

There is a wide space between fine art and commercial art, where many creative pieces sit. This space between commercial and fine art practices is a grey area that is quite ambiguous, and more often than not, both forms of art overlap when it comes to processes, aesthetics and value. The way an audience engages in imagery from an emotional level is of particular interest to me, being a creative working within this ‘grey area’. On one level, the artist’s sources of inspiration for a work – what I define as the work’s context, intention and functionality– provide justification to the viewer for the creation of a work. Yet, an image seen on its own –without any knowledge of the artist’s inspiration or reasoning for its creation –can also appeal to a viewer. Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto talks about the idea of ‘real’ and ‘reality’ (which he calls ‘copies’). He states, “a camera takes photographs of the real world to produce a copy [reality]” (1). Sugimoto understands of his art as Shashin, the “transforming the real” (2). The ‘real’ he refers to applies to both fine art and commercial art, which often provide reality disguised as the real through its appeal to the audience’s emotion on a conscious and subconscious level. This year of postgraduate study has brought up several questions for me, the most important being: how do I justify my images as fine art, rather than commercial art? The institutional requirements of the university to produce a body of work that sits comfortably within the realm of fine art rather than commercial art. Is it possible to create something ‘real’ (with regards to Sugimoto’s definition of the word (3)) within a society which simultaneously functions on commercial platforms such as social media and advertising, built for an audience that sells itself its own reality, and the rarefied, institutionalised realm of fine art, with its own system of valuing work These concepts are explored through five key points, listed below: 1. Context, Intention and Function 2. Sympathy, Empathy and Vulnerability 3. Culture Scarcity and the Popularity of a Disengaged Audience 4. Art and the Commodity 5. Imagery in New Media I aim to explore the ‘grey area’ between definitions and boundaries of commercial and fine art. By examining the relationship of the viewer to various forms of imagery, the emotional register of art and its connection to ‘reality’ and the ‘real’ reveals its critical role in opening up space in the term ‘art’. In exploring the ideas of what fine art is to us and how fine art imagery differentiates itself from commercial imagery, it is important to acknowledge that two main concepts are crucial in defining works on the scale of ‘fine art’ to ‘commercial art’. These are; context and function.