Mind over medium

When sculpture, painting, music, dance and poetry have been traditionally viewed as acceptable forms of “high” art, it may seem hard at first to believe that media such as videogames, comics, posters and television shows are now burgeoning forms of “serious” art. It is not so much the issue of what medium is being wielded for these forms of art, but the misplaced precedence that is being held in WHAT is considered as art.

Isn’t art, in essence, an expression that deliberately affects the senses or emotions?

The answer is yes, but the importance of expression and perception is overlooked in narrative and commercial art because of its procedure of execution: everything can be reproduced rapidly with the help of machinery to reveal a product to the mass. It’s so cheap, so repeatable, so unframable. It’s commonplace--ordinary, unimportant. It is something you see every day; they are “basic human traits.”

But because “higher” art has always been exclusive to one class—a class with wealth and status, “higher” art subsequently coquets with snobbery. This painting, sculpture or film is for the viewing of the intellectually and culturally enriched only. It is special, one-of-a-kind, viewed only such few times during a person’s entire lifetime. “High” art isn’t pragmatic; it’s entirely aesthetic.

Well, what about the literary comics, magazines and animation? What about the arcane installation art that is plastered with bombast statements that attempt to substitute your reality with their own? They both do exist. Again, the medium is not the issue, but the lack of effective expression and perception. A highly regarded medium doesn’t make a bad idea a good one. Neither does the humble medium make an idea humble, either.

If anything, the narrative form of art is a friendly flavor, succulent in nostalgia. Right down to the way it was presented, at which time it was presented, and what was being presented in it, it depicted lifestyles in detail, so very intimately that it is sometimes even viewed as far as a substitute for reality. Strong ideas made strong impacts.

Perhaps the reason why comics and animation were looked so down upon initially was because they used to be drawn patronizingly. They were seen more as toys because of its simplistic writing and conceptualization, which ended up with flat characters and settings. Artists who revolutionized comics into what we’re familiar with today did not happen until the mid-20th century.
It was also not until recently that comics were beginning to be known as the “ninth art”—that is, coming after painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance, poetry, television and film, it is the ninth addition.

Strong appreciation for this medium is growing in several different countries; France had opened the comic book counterpart to the world-famous museum, the Louvre. Called the “Musée de la bande dessiné” (the museum of comic art), its initiative was not about validating comic strips as art, or modernizing itself to appeal to today’s generation, but to present this art with the goal of showing its diverse aesthetic quality.

The conventional perspective that divides the line between “high” and “low” art is entering its first steps of elimination: with the nascent establishment of equilibrium in the wider art world, it’s not so much the narrative and commercial art form that is being “modernized” now so much as the people who are viewing them.