Pop art versus Fine Art

[liquid06]

I was watching the coolest documentary style educational film from Annenberg media called "The Art of Teaching the Arts." It was about teaching strategies that could be applied across the spectrum of arts classes from visual art to drama to music and dance.

The dance teacher made a distinction when he was talking between the "fine art" and the "popular art." I took this to explain why the class was studying pure movement and not setting a hip hop dance. Fine art classes would be classes that study the form and shape of the movement with a critical eye, seeing it as a composition rather than a show. The popular art perspective in this instance would be doing art that students would think is "cool" and teaching them how to be cool with specificity. That would mean setting and performing a dynamite hip hop number in the style of MTV. I don't often watch something on MTV and think "wow that was a beautiful movement" or "the line from the hand to the knee really made that pose memorable" it's not usually analyzed in the way that a fine art always is.

I'm currently taking a class in a visual medium that's proving to be the same way. The teacher uses words like 'cool" and "neat" in the critiques and doesn't talk at all about composition, color layout and basic design topics. Even if he assumes that we already know it, he could still use those things as a basis to relate his ideas about a piece with more clarity. Each student's work is given 5-7 minutes tops, and he does all the talking, no one else is encouraged to have input. It's so easy, when classmates do have input, to copy his lead and say "That's really cool."

Personally I think that the situation is really disrespectful to the fine art form that we're studying. We're being given pop art without regard to the possibilities for this form in the fine art realm.

Does anyone else see that distinction?  

[Pensakura]

Wow, that's not cool! If you are studying the fine art of dance they shouldn't bring hip hop into it. Even though I like to watch is occasionally I wouldn't consider it fine art. I can see when talking about ballet you wouldn't just shout out "Cool! Awesome!"  

[hell_sent_6]

Pensakura

Wow, that's not cool! If you are studying the fine art of dance they shouldn't bring hip hop into it. Even though I like to watch is occasionally I wouldn't consider it fine art. I can see when talking about ballet you wouldn't just shout out "Cool! Awesome!"

i have to agree with u there, i love gangster rap and a bit of hip hop but i by no means would consider hip hop or that crap pop artists do dancing much less consider that form of dancing a fine art  

[Martyrize]

What I believe has thus been stated clearly by the two people before me, enough said. :]  

[Romeo_moon]

Hello, I'm new to the guild, and this will be my first post biggrin .
I find myself in a similar situation with digital art vs. traditional art. Stuff done with Photoshop and other computer programs can be interesting, but I feel like it's lacking something. Perhaps because it's such a new medium to work in? Or the overly polished look some of this art has? I still kind of see it as Pop Art or Graphic Design, more fit for mass distrobution on the internet or in magazines, rather than something that would be hung in a museum confused .  

[Blue Eyed Wallflower]

What you're saying angers me because in my opinion, hip hop is not judged and studied like fine art because there is a tabu that it's just some thing that rappers do in their videos. If people stopped thinking of it that way and started critiquing it in other ways, it could be considered fine art. I would actually look at balle and say cool because of some of the incredible leaps and all the intense balancing. Just like when I see a hip hop dance I think cool, but also like to look at how a person could do some of the amazing moves. Sorry if my post made no sense.  

[Pensakura]

Romeo_moon

Hello, I'm new to the guild, and this will be my first post biggrin .
I find myself in a similar situation with digital art vs. traditional art. Stuff done with Photoshop and other computer programs can be interesting, but I feel like it's lacking something. Perhaps because it's such a new medium to work in? Or the overly polished look some of this art has? I still kind of see it as Pop Art or Graphic Design, more fit for mass distrobution on the internet or in magazines, rather than something that would be hung in a museum confused .

Exactly. I love both, but they have their places.  

[Luscara]

It all depends on the curriculum. I am a classical muscian as well as having a jazz background. Also I am a traditional artist who is swimming in a world of digital mass production.

If the curriculum you study is worth it's snuff, then you're going to cover both... also there is a difference between Pop Art (which is a movement of fine arts) and Popular Art. Popular art would be anime, while Pop Art would be Jasper Johns, Claus Oldenberg and Andy Warhol. Pop Art is considered Art Historically significant right now, while Anime has yet to crack the pages of most respected Art History texts.

I'm a grad student studying art. I study all art, popular and historically significant. I do the same with music, and that's why I play multiple instruments, allowing myself to skirt genres and be open to anything.

100 years ago Jazz was considered low-brow and uncouth. To say that Hip-Hop dancing is these things, and too common for the curriculum doesn't allow for the advancement of dance as an art form. If schools like Juilliard, San Francisco's Conservatory of Dance, and other schools of the like are accepting it as a form of dance, then an art video from the 80/90's is not the reference you want to look at.

Not trying to offend, just an observation.  

[Lynor Eclipse]

I took a course in popular music and finally found a teacher whose way of thinking matched my own. We looked at popular music from an ethnomusicological point of view, which was an awesome way to analyze it. I definitely agreed with him in that no one form of music is "higher" than another form, despite many years of being taught to think like that. Western European Art Music only makes up like 1/20th of the world's music, if that. There are so many other areas of music worth studying, I really hope that music studies moves towards a broader spectrum of material in the future.

And, yeah, a lot of popular music is simplistic, but there are still ways to look at it from an academic point of view, get something out of it, and enjoy it. I remember looking at a couple of Beatles' songs in my second year music history course several years ago... it was interesting to see the time signature changes they used, and other innovative techniques.

Other ethnomusicology courses I've taken include World music (that time around we studied Canadian First Nations' music, and Canadian fiddle music), and South Indian rhythms and ragas. Oh, and that popular music course I took touched on popular music from several areas: different eras of American pop music, different Asian pop music (J-pop, K-pop, etc), and a list that was devised for the top 50 Canadian popular songs of all time.