Analyze the difference between real art and popular art from the aesthetic point of view.

In the modern world, the boundary between serious art and popular art and even daily life itself is gradually disappearing. In traditional society, there are essential differences between art and practical products, elegant art and popular art, which are composed of profound philosophical connotation, advanced aesthetic taste and extraordinary artistic skills of art itself. However, in the period of artistic modernism, the difference between serious art and popular art, and even daily life itself is becoming less and less obvious. For example, in the modern art exhibition, some exhibits are a pile of sand with some peanut shells on it, and some are welded together with some scrap copper and iron. A famous artist took his urinal to the exhibition hall and became a work of art; A musician's "4 minutes and 33 seconds" silence can also be a performance; When a painter paints himself and stands in an exhibition hall covered with feathers, it becomes a human work of art. Sometimes art exhibitions can even be held without works of art. yves klein, a representative of the new Dadaism in Europe, opened an "empty" exhibition at 1958. It was a gallery painted all white, with guards at the door and all the equipment removed. As a result, thousands of visitors came to the preview site, and so many people almost caused riots. What's more, the destroyed art can also become art.1October 1986 165438 China held the famous "Xiamen Burning Works Exhibition", where artists painted all the exhibited works of art into a circle with white powder and burned them. Outside the circle stands a sign that says "Dada Exhibition is over".

These peculiar modern art phenomena are difficult to analyze or summarize from the definition and context of traditional art. On the one hand, not all popular art and daily behavior can become art. On the other hand, of course, many modern artists' experimental art has indeed produced amazing artistic effects of traditional art. Therefore, the best way to distinguish serious art from popular art is to abandon the traditional art classification principle and start from whether it has aesthetic connotation.

From the perspective of artistic feeling, popular art is only related to people's physiological feelings, and exists as the expression medium of people's instinctive desires, such as morbid, sloppy, weird, poor, sticky, open or hidden sexy "funk art". And serious art transcends the physiology of this feeling and desire and becomes the perceptual proof of human aesthetic essence. For example, when we face a human oil painting, we can basically have two feelings. One is directly connected with the physiological human body structure of the object projected by physiological desire; The other is to transcend the direct sensory impulse through aesthetic deformation and experience a kind of love and appreciation for life itself. This can be compared with the famous fountain of Dadaism artist Dusan and the painting of the same name by classical painter Angel. In Toussaint's Fountain, the work of art is a signed urinal, which gives people a feeling of physical discomfort, but in Engel's Fountain, it gives people a feeling of sublimation of beauty.

From the perspective of aesthetic objects, serious art is produced by creative activities in the object world. It is an aesthetic illusion that overcomes the natural nature of the object, arouses the subject's sense of freedom and leads to sensory liberation. This serious art with aesthetic appearance is of course different from daily necessities with only one practical value. It can also be said that although serious art and popular art are the products of human labor and production, the structure of the products themselves is quite different. Serious art is a living organism, which has the same dignity and status as life itself. Popular art, on the other hand, is a mechanical device, a mechanical representation for practical purposes and a tool to serve people's physiological feelings. This can be illustrated by comparing artistic masterpieces with second-rate works. Masterpieces of art are all products of aesthetic deformation and physical processing and transformation. As Rudolf arnheim pointed out, "The poet doesn't quote specific details at random, but emphasizes those individual characteristics that can make the theme get his artistic imagination. ..... Because of its dynamic concreteness, it distinguishes masterpieces from second-rate works. Second-rate works are not enough to go beyond the specific state it presents, while masterpieces cover the whole range of human experience from sensory perception to exquisite thinking. " (Editor-in-Chief Hu Jingzhi: Selected Western Literary Theories in the Twentieth Century, Volume I, China Social Sciences Press, 1989, p. 246. In this sense, the farther away a work of art is from its material and practical purpose, the more it has the connotation of a real work of art, for example, China once had a very famous performance art. In this kind of performance art, the performer wants to kill a cow, gut it, and then stay naked in the cow's stomach for 10 minutes-no matter how profound the artistic concept it wants to express, its practical characteristics aimed at stimulating people's physiological senses cannot be erased, which is a far cry from serious art.

From art consumption's point of view, artistic essence, as an aesthetic illusion, is very different from ordinary consumer goods. General daily necessities are disposable, no matter how durable, they will always lose their inherent use value until they are completely exhausted. On the other hand, works of art are creatures with eternal charm. In this sense, the difference between serious art and popular art is that the latter is more similar to a consumer product in essence. However, as a kind of spiritual consumer goods, popular art has produced many negative effects on serious art and the healthy development of human spirit. The consumption object of serious art is the aesthetic illusion itself. The more people consume aesthetic illusion, the higher the satisfaction of people's aesthetic essential strength, which is an important spiritual practice to enrich and perfect human nature. However, popular art often consumes human nature itself through anti-culture and anti-rationality. In this process, the more people understand the purely entertaining art consumption, the more serious the cultural alienation of people themselves, the paler human nature and the poorer the value connotation of life. Therefore, critically examining the harmfulness of popular art has become an important topic of contemporary art and cultural criticism.

From the perspective of value form, the difference between serious art and popular art lies in that the former is something with eternal artistic charm and can be consumed repeatedly; The latter is a one-time "throw away" thing. This is also because serious art consumption activities also have a process of aesthetic deformation, and each deformation actually has a value-added significance of reproduction. It can also be said that the consumption structure of serious art has two levels, just as the reader's reflection theory holds that artistic charm is produced and proved in consumption activities. As a commercial and cultural commodity, popular art has only one artistic effect structure. For example, the famous pop artist Hamilton expressed the quality of popular art in 1957: "Popular, short-lived, affordable, funny, sexy, gimmicky and charming. It must also be cheap, mass-produced, young and profitable. " ([English] Edward Lucy Smith: Modern Visual Art after 1945, translated by Chen Mai, Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House, 1988, p. 114. )

"Eternal charm" is rooted in positive aesthetic imagination in consumption activities. Because this kind of imagination is only related to the formal structure of the object, it will not lose the desire and enthusiasm for consumption because of utilitarian content. The consumption pattern of "use and discard" means that consumers consume the redundant physiological desires of the subject through the utilitarian structure of the object, so once the physiological desires of the subject are vented, the "consumption" value of the artistic work itself will inevitably disappear. Take the movie Titanic, which caused a sensation in the world from 65438 to 0998, as an example. It relies on abundant financial resources and high-tech tools to reconstruct the visual reality, as well as huge advertisements to arouse the audience's utilitarian consumption desire. Once the "human feelings" and "desires" rooted in "things" are vented and satisfied, they will inevitably become leftovers, so they come and go quickly, so it won't be long before this huge ship that once landed all over the world will be completely abandoned at the bottom of memory. This is why people call contemporary art fast food art, which corresponds to traditional classic art, and can only temporarily satisfy people's physical hunger and thirst, but can't meet people's real spiritual needs. Just as Aldono criticized contemporary pop culture: "The cultural industry deceives consumers by constantly making wishes to them. It constantly changes the activities and decorations it enjoys, but this promise has not been actually fulfilled, just letting customers draw cakes to satisfy their hunger. " ([Germany] Adorno: Dialectics of Enlightenment, English version, London 1979, p. 120. )

Since the 1960s, mass culture and art, with industrial reproduction and modern communication technology as material means, has become a global cultural landscape with an irresistible momentum. All kinds of cultural images, photos, photography, television, movies, and their reproduction and mass production, like commodity production, surround the world today with all kinds of cultural illusions, which obscure the authenticity of real things and works of art themselves and lead to the unrealization of society and the world. In contemporary society, we must have a clear understanding of popular art and culture. As a spiritual way for people to solve the shortcomings of modern scientific and technological civilization in the 20th century, popular art and culture can help contemporary people. However, on the one hand, it destroys the subject's artistic feelings by physiological catharsis, on the other hand, it becomes a tool to control people's own spiritual production with the help of modern communication technology, so it is by no means a real art, nor is it a way to liberate human hearts.

The negative influence of popular culture and art on human beings has been noticed by many western scholars. Judging from the influence of popular culture and art on subjective artistic feelings, art consumption's journalism and commercialization denied the subjectivity of human individuals in aesthetic activities. At this time, art consumption is bound to become a tool to deprive and alienate people themselves. As toffler pointed out: "In these large-scale media tools, from newspapers to radio, movies and television, we once again found the embodiment of the basic principles of the workshop. All these media tools, with the same imprint, spread to the minds of thousands of people, just like a factory casting products of the same specifications and selling them to thousands of families. Standardized' facts', standardized replicas and mass-produced finished products have been processed by several centralized' thought workshops' and continuously flowed to millions of consumers. Without such an extensive and powerful information and communication system, industrial civilization could not have such a scale and play such an effective function today. " ([America] toffler: The Third Wave, translated by Zhu Zhiyan, Joint Publishing Company, 1988, p. 88. Moreover, once this spiritual workshop replaces the individuality and aesthetic creativity of artistic production and consumption, it will inevitably make people themselves according to a certain ideology, as Rhett said: "Machines can no longer only make material products, but also make ideas. Millions of people live on the same popular art, which is the most harmful abstract form, so their ability to grasp any human reality is rapidly disappearing. If, among the lonely people, there is a face that occasionally shines with the brilliance of human nature, it will soon disappear again because of the hypnosis of the TV screen. " ([America] Barrett: Irrational Man, translated by Peng Jingxi, Heilongjiang Education Press, 1988, p. 27 1. )

Contemporary popular culture controls the production and consumption of artistic culture itself with the help of modern communication technology. How to cope with the challenges brought by contemporary cultural and artistic activities and enhance the cultural taste and aesthetic connotation of popular art has become the primary issue in the development of contemporary art.