Art History the Functions and Dysfunctions Mass

Art History

The Functions and Dysfunctions Mass Media advertising and Elitist vs. Popular Art in John Berger's "Ways of Seeing"

The emergence of the Industrial Revolution gave birth to numerous movements that influenced contemporary culture and society at the turn of 20th century. The increase in production and distribution of goods and services, and the production of surplus of these goods and services gave birth to advertising. Consequently, advertising, in order to attract and entice consumers to buy their products or subsist to their services, came up with creative concepts on advertising their products and services -- through art and the mass media. Thus, popular culture was created, where mass communicated media messages are extended to consumers in visual, audio, print, and, nowadays, in multimedia forms.

Advertising is an essential factor that propagates two interrelated elements in today's capitalist world: popular culture and consumption. These two are interrelated because what is included in popular culture tends to be patronized by society, which explains why advertising is a very lucrative market for goods, services, and even ideologies to be propagated and accepted by society.

These functions of the mass media, particularly the advertising sector, are discussed extensively in Ways of Seeing by John Berger. In the last chapter of his book, he discusses how mass media and art promote publicity, which, for him, is the symbol of freedom: "Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately benefits the public... And the national economy. It is closely related to certain ideas about freedom... The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of 'The Free World'."

In addition, Berger compares publicity with that of art, stating that Europe's history illustrates the transition and change in media on how people "see things," i.e., art used to be the most prevalent visual form, replaced by publicity when capitalism has set in the human society. This change or transition does not mean that art is synonymous with publicity. In fact, Berger posits that the two are different, since art, as projected in the mass media, pertains to the elitist society, while publicity caters to the mass or general public. Art, says Berger, "suggests cultural authority... which is superior to any vulgar material interest," while publicity is "the culture of the consumer society. It propagates through images that society's belief in itself."