Visual Voice 1

Popular Culture and Visual Voice

What is mainstream?

Mainstream is something that is dominant and prominent in society. It gets endorsements from the media. It is fashion trends (trend forecasting), pop music (pop music used to just mean popular music but now it is more of a type) and ideas shared by most people.

"The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness."

- Emile Durkheim

‘Determinate system’

The area you grow up in will have a certain environment which will probably influence the way you grow up with certain ideas and be interested in certain things.  

Collective consciousness is an underlying sociological concept referring to a set of ideas, beliefs and attitudes that are shared between a social group or society. An example of this is religion.

How does popular culture affect our practice?

• It could influence us subconsciously

• It could influence how we decide to make are career - mainstream makes money - you may not want to take the risk to be different as you might not get noticed

• However mainstream is always looked down upon

• Artistic integrity is sometimes compromised but doesn't always have to be - once you've got so big you can do whatever you want (to an extent) as people tend to still love what you do e.g. Arctic Monkeys

Taste Cultures: Low Art vs High Art

The popularity of art and who created it determines whether it is categorised as low or high art. High Art requires intelligence therefore a good education. They are valuing the tastes of the educated over the majority.

An 'us' and 'them' stance was created but over time this barrier as stetted to come down but there is still a lot of stigma around high art due to its superior status.

Authorship: Conceptualising the Visual Voice

Film authorship is usually determined by a filmmaker whose body of work is accomplished, has a clear signature style, and has a theme that unites their body of work. For example Christopher Nolan produced, wrote and directed Dunkirk so I would say he has authorship over the film. Whereas who has authorship over the any of the Marvel films? Stan Lee wrote the comic books but there are different directs, screenplay writers for each film so who should get the credit. Without the comic book the films would never have never happened. However a film is usually the directors vision.