How the art affects cultural turmoil
While researching texts and articles written about art, music, architecture and sculpture of the 20th century it became evident that it reflected and conveyed both political and cultural turmoil taking place in its era.
For instance, reggae music came as an important cultural influence not only in Jamaica but in the whole world. This music has influenced people around the world, taking part in the development of the counterculture movements, especially in Africa, Europe and USA. By the end of the 1960s, it contributed in the beginning of the skinhead movement in Great Britain. In the 1970s, it influenced on Western pop cultures, inspired the first rappers in the USA and contributed to the rock culture. Since the late 1970 it have been impacting on singers originating from Africa. (Dagnini 2)
The work which illustrates the effect of art in turmoil context is “Avant Garde and Kitch” by Clement Greenberg which is considered to be one of the most important theoretical essays of the twentieth century culture.
In an effort to go beyond Alexandrianism part of Western bourgeois society, avant-garde culture was created. This was made possible thanks to a special way of a better understanding of the history of a new kind of criticism of society: historical criticism. It has been demonstrated that our present bourgeois social order is actually not eternal, "natural" condition of life, but only the last in a series of successive social orders. New perspectives of this kind, became a part of the advanced consciousness of intellectuals 50-60-ies of the XIX century, were soon assimilated for the most part, unconsciously to artists and poets. Hence, the birth of the avant-garde is not an accidental chronologically and it coincided with the first breakthrough of scientific revolutionary thought in Europe.
Yet the assertion that once the avant-garde was able to "step back" from society, it follows the same step completely changed its position and rejected. Hwever revolutionary and bourgeois policy remained valid. The revolution was left inside society as part of the furious ideological struggle which art and poetry found so hostile, just as it was beginning to affect the "precious" axiomatic beliefs, hitherto lying in the culture basis.
It follows that the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to "experiment", but to ensure the movement of culture in the ideological confusion and violence. Completely away from the public, the poet-garde or avant-garde artist sought to maintain a high level of their art, while narrowing and raising it to the expression of the absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would find a permission or have lost their meaning. There were "art for art's sake" and "pure poetry", and the subject or content became something of which to be shy.
Clement Greenberg in his work states, that “Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the society of Western Europe and America and contributed what is called universal literacy.” (Greenberg 7)
Finally, it can be evident from the “Art and Turmoil” part of the Chinese culture, there has been a difference of interest in the Cultural Revolution not as a way like a massive social and political upheaval resulting from personal antagonisms and also philosophical differences, but as a time of conoclasm and experimentation in the arts, which were sometimes brutal and radical, the effects of which show effect long after the Cultural Revolution was condemned in China and all over the world. (King 15)
Works Cited
Richard King. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 (Contemporary Chinese Studies). Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010. Print
Clement Greenberg. Avant Garde and Kitsch. 1939, WEB, Retrieved from: sharecom.ca
Jérémie Kroubo Dagnini. The Importance of Reggae Music in the Worldwide Cultural Universe. Aug 2010, WEB, Retrieved from: etudescaribeennes.revues.org
