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art and society

Does art imitate life or is it the other way around?

T raditionally, we have believed that art imitates life. The painter represents what
he or she sees by producing a scene on a canvas. The sculptor does the same with
bronze or stone. A photographer or film maker does it even more directly. A writer
describes life in his or her books. This simple concept is known as mimesis.

But some have questioned the one-way nature of mimesis by arguing that art also changes the
way we view the world, and in fact, life sometimes imitates art rather than the other way around.
The person who first articulated this belief effectively was Oscar Wilde. Speaking about the
foggy conditions in London in the late 19th century, he wrote that the way we perceive them
changed because of art. Referring to the wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our
streets, blurring the gas lamps and turning houses into shadows he argued that poets and
painters have taught [people] the loveliness of such effects. According to Wilde, They did not
exist till Art had invented them.
And you dont have to look too far to see anti-mimesis in our lives. To what extent is
our outlook on life altered by ideas we read in books? The portrayal of people in
films? The styles we see in fashion photography? One great example of this is the
TV series The Sopranos, and how it affected both the Mafia in the USA and the FBI.

Arts influence on society: propaganda and censorship

T hroughout history, it has always been the case that art has the power to change
society, especially when new media are used to express an idea. During the First
World War, for example, movie cameras were used for the first time to record trench
warfare when the film was shown in cinemas

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in Britain, audiences ran out screaming. This led to the government censoring
further such use of such a powerful medium. And in government censorship, and
use of art as propaganda, we see how seriously governments take the effect of art.

All of the major dictators of the C20th understood the power of art to influence the population. In
Nazi Germany, Hitler set up the Ministry of Propaganda and National Enlightenment. It was
headed by Goebbels, who made sure that nothing was published, performed, or exhibited without
his approval.
And what Goebbels approved, of course, only fit in with Nazi ideology and ideas. In terms of art,
this meant no modern and abstract art, certainly nothing hostile to the regime, and nothing that
featured images other than the stereotypical blonde-haired, blue eyed set in idyllic pastoral
scenes of blissful happiness.
In Stalinist Russia, there was also a keen understanding of the power of art. Art portrayed
contented peasants, industrious workers, and Stalin himself. In fact, Stalin was shown god-like in
many paintings, a phenomenon known as the Cult of Stalin. Just as in Germany, gigantic
architectural projects expressed the power of the state.
However, there is no doubt that in Russia there were greater artistic achievements than in Nazi
Germany. Composers worked with fewer hindrances as seen in the works by Prokoviev and
Shostakovich, and film-makers such as Eisenstein emerged.

Arts influence on society: the trial of Lady Chatterleys Lover

B ut even under less oppressive governments, the artistic expression of certain ideas can be
subject to control. One great example is the book Lady Chatterleys Lover by DH Lawrence,
which was deemed offensive on many levels. In this book, Constance Reid, a woman from a
progressive liberal middle class family marries a minor member of the aristocracy, Lord Clifford
Chatterley, and takes the title Lady Chatterley. But her husband is injured in the First World
War, confined to a wheelchair, and left impotent. Despite this, he becomes a successful writer
and businessman. It is more his obsession with financial success and fame rather than any
physical difficulties which come between him and his wife, and she begins an affair with their
gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors.

The largely aristocratic establishment of Britain at the time the book was
published in Italy in 1928 were shocked by many aspects of the book. First, there
was the fact that the book was obscene, in the way it went into explicit detail the
affair that took place (see below). Second, there was the fact that a women was
breaking her marriage vows, something considered far worse than a man behaving
in the same way. Finally, it represented an intimate relationship between a member
of the lower classes (although it emerges during the story that Mellors is actually
well-educated, and became an officer in the army during the First World War) and
the upper classes, a concept that was totally taboo in Britain at that time. The
book was duly banned.
But the book was republished by Penguin books in 1960. The attorney general,
Reginald Manningham-Buller (dubbed Bullying-Manners by the journalist and
author Bernard Levin) had to read only four chapters to decide to prosecute Penguin
books for publishing it. What annoyed him was not just the content, but the fact
that the price of the book meant it was affordable to women and members of the
lower classes (remember that only few women worked at this time, and husbands
were generally in charge of family finances).

The trial was a disaster for Manningham-Buller and the prosecution. They had failed to find any
experts to support their case, in stark contrast to Penguins defence team, which had brought in
authors, journalists, academics, and even members of the clergy to defend the book.
Manningham-Buller and his team had very little idea of what Lawrence had been trying to
express in his book, regularly being caught out by the superior insight of the witnesses they were
trying to catch out. And although they tried to shock the jury in his opening speech,
Manningham-Buller announced: The word fuck or fucking appears no less than 30 times . . .
Cunt 14 times; balls 13 times; shit and arse six times apiece; cock four times; piss three
times, and so on. they were unable to prove that the book would have a negative influence on
the readers it was aimed at.
According to the Guardian:
No other jury verdict in British history has had such a deep social impact. Over the next three
months Penguin sold 3m copies of the book an example of what many years later was
described as the Spycatcher effect, by which the attempt to suppress a book through
unsuccessful litigation serves only to promote huge sales. The jury that iconic representative of
democratic society had given its imprimatur to ending the taboo on sexual discussion in art and
entertainment. Within a few years the stifling censorship of the theatre by the lord chamberlain
had been abolished, and a gritty realism emerged in British cinema and drama. (Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning came out at the same time as the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley, and very
soon Peter Finch was commenting on Glenda Jacksons tired old tits in Sunday Bloody Sunday
and Ken Tynan said the first fuck on the BBC.) Homosexuality was decriminalised, abortions
were available on reasonable demand, and in order to obtain a divorce it was unnecessary to
prove that a spouse had committed the matrimonial crime of adultery. Judges no longer put on
black caps to sentence prisoners to hang by the neck until dead.
Can we say, though, that it was art in this case that changed society, or was it an interaction
between human sciences (ie, the law) and the arts (the book) that led to change? This is from the
same Guardian article:
the message of Lady Chatterleys Lover, half a century after the trial, is that literature in itself
does no harm at all. The damage that gets attributed to books and to plays and movies and
cartoons is caused by the actions of people who try to suppress them.
The effect of art: presentation

W hat other piece of art has profoundly changed the way we view the world? And was it the art
that did it, or the way it was used that made the impact? Use this site to help you introduce to us
an influential piece of art. Think about the type of change it wrought, for example, ethical, social,
metaphysical, etc.