Placing Art

"How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played - the night you saw her - she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art." 

-Dorian Gray to Basil Hallward, Ch. IX, The Picture of Dorian Gray

I spent my first year of English A-level debating, amongst other less pretentious study, whether Oscar Wilde subscribed to the hedonism and aestheticism of Lord Henry and Dorian Gray and if, as was used to testify against him in his trial and subsequent conviction for gross indecency, the novel these two characters situate, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', was in some way a reflection of Wilde himself. Contrary to Wilde's dubious preface outline that 'it is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors' and 'all art is quite useless', the fate of Dorian and his portrait almost perfectly mirrors that of Wilde and his novel; a perfect thematic and contextual parallel for a literature student to note in an exam, but also interesting from a semantic perspective.   

In 1907 Alfred Lichtwark, a German art historian, mused that 'in our age there is no work of art that is looked at so closely as a photograph of oneself, one's closest relatives and friends, one's sweetheart'. Theorists like Walter Benjamin and John Berger alike have essayed around Lichtwark's muse by questioning the understanding of photography and art through inquiry of aesthetic distinctions and social functions (see: 'A Small History of Photography' (1931, Benjamin) and 'Understanding a Photograph' (2013, Berger)). The argument that photography might itself constitute a form of art has been enumerated by proponents for almost a century, at its heart lying the question of art and purpose posed rather fatefully by Wilde. But whilst the medium has been thus explored, its location is oft left implicitly static. Photography: art. Art: gallery (primarily). Gallery: exclusivity. We've recognised the self-expressionism of art, and eventually expanded its tool from brush and paint to camera (etc.), yet it remains a term of exclusive connotation. I don't want to debase the concept of art - its very core dependent upon an aspect of creativity, peculiarity, and representation rather than pure being such that it cannot, surely, be the everyday - but I do think that art can be found in the everyday, beyond the canvas and outside of the gallery.

Might not your social media page be a site, or at a greater stretch form, of art? Queue Lord Henry dropping his glass of gin and shuddering upright in the study of his West London apartment at the very thought.      

Consider it. Instagram: you select, to the exclusion of others, the pictures you upload; you edit, caption and share these pictures in the curation of a particular aesthetic; you allow others to view your page, as you view theirs, often selectively, and in this way display an interpretive narration of your life. Similar to a gallery in function and format, but on an individual scale. Where is art? 

Inevitably, the question becomes: what is art? That I neither want to pose, nor answer. Not everything can be art, for then art is everything and the concept loses its ontological frame. Which may not be a bad thing. Perhaps. Taking Lichtwark's framing of art as photographs of oneself, one's closest relatives and friends, one's sweetheart, the most everyday framework, art becomes something self-reflective and personal. Social media sites curate this most effectively, constructing a particular expression, selectively and often with much time and effort, of oneself that one shares with others and through which one memorialises a particular time, event, thought. A celebration; a commemoration; a commiseration. As Dorian sees his actions, thoughts and experiences reflected in his portrait, so we construct our pages on social media to do so - albeit the highlights, not the darkest thoughts and corruptions as colour Dorian's painting. 

Functionally, social media sites are designed for socialising: sharing, keeping in contact, following. They aren't designed for art, even less as art. But in purpose and use, a parallel can be drawn. For many, their social media page is a display of where they've been, who they've seen, what they like; who they are, or at least would like you to think they are, as pretentiously common as that statement has become. It's a form of constructionism and of representation. Gainsborough's 'Mr and Mrs Andrews' is a form of constructionism and representation; it represents hegemonic power relations between man and wife, man and animal, landowner and labourer (etc.) and simultaneously constructs them as the norm. My recent Instagram of dusk falling over a bay in Cape Town helps to construct, along with earlier and later posts, a particular normative view of my time in South Africa, representing it as I would like others to view it. With this purpose and use, it becomes a site of art, even art in itself when taken as a total narrative entity, paralleling Gainsborough's painting hanging in the National Gallery albeit collapsing space and substance.  

The purpose of art is not sole, and never can it be. I think that's why there is, and can be, a struggle over its meaning and interpretation. To push such exclusivity would, rather more than the case for social media as a form of art in its own way, debase art conceptually. In expression and function social media hosts, and in many ways is, art. Or at least, one interpretation of that heralded entity.