Crowther, Paul. Defining Art, Creating the Canon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Page 110-112
“The issue can be focused initially in terms of the distinction often drawn (and also frequently denied) between the products of mass culture and those of ‘high art’.
For present purposes, one could put the problem like this. Kitsch paintings, pop songs, TV soap operas, and the like, are all kinds of image, but the term ‘art’ would seem travestied if applied to them.
The task, then, is to clarify the conditions under which art in the sense of image per se becomes art in the sense of the second normative axis. This means specifically that we must consider the way in which general historical relations mediate the production and reception of art qua aesthetic object. For it is only under such conditions of mediation that the reflective significance of art—its distinctive power of experimental illumination—fully emerges.
In what follows, I will pick up and significantly develop some key aspects of Kant’s theory of fine art (as broached in Chapter 3). I start with the decisive notion of originality.
First, production in all fields of art-making—indeed artifice in general—involves the following of rules. Similar consideration pertaining to methodology, rigour, the gathering of evidence, and verification procedures, also guide the pursuit of forms of knowledge in general.
Now in the case of artifice (in industrialized societies at least) the bulk of production is effected simply by following rules. The criteria of functional efficiency which determine work processes and end products, make the particular identity of the producer into something contingent. Who one is as a person and one’s particular interests, are abilities that may lead to one doing one job rather than another; special aptitudes, indeed, may mean that one does the job rather well; but these personality factors are only significant to the degree that they promote or are conducive to efficiency. They do not figure as a necessary element in either production or end product.
Similar considerations hold (albeit more controversially) in relation to theory or discovery in most forms of knowledge. Odd personality traits, good luck, or untoward conjunctions of circumstance, all play their role in the formulation of theory and the making of discoveries.
In the case of art, in contrast, matters are much more complex. Kitsch works, and most products of mass culture, are produced according to fairly distinct formulae of functional efficiency. Even here, however, the role of individual creativity can be more than simply a contingent one.
The hugely successful TV soap opera Coronation Street, for example, was devised by Tony Warren in 1960. The idea for a drama series based on northern English working-class life, of course, could easily have been devised by someone else; but the possibilities of plot and characterization presented by his original idea—the, as it were, flesh of Coronation Street—are very much a function of Warren’s idiosyncratic original formulation.
In the case of ‘high art’, the role of individual creativity—expressed through style—is utterly and absolutely central, and should be stated in the strongest possible terms. The key concept here is originality. It has two basic dimensions—refinement and innovation. A work which refines is one whose style takes up established motifs and idioms and articulates them to an unprecedented degree of excellence. The innovatory work, in contrast, is, in some respects, unprecedented in the way it departs from existing motifs and idioms, and introduces new ones"
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