'In his studio the artist has no social responsibility. But when the artist displays his work the situation changes'

Today we discussed and researched this quote as a group in the COP seminar. It came under the heading society but it is clear that there is overlap between themes. 

Everyone drew different things from the quote which meant we came up with an interesting mash of ideas. We discussed the difference between right and responsibility and the fact that the artist has the right to voice their own opinions but then they have a responsibility to not say certain things. The quote also hi lights the significance of audience and context. These are things which the artist needs to be aware of, as the responsibility comes with how people respond to the work. However, if an audience misinterpret a piece and are as a result offended, is this then down to the artist? And does the artist not still have a moral responsibility when creating artwork which is never to leave the studio?

Through talking about ’social responsibility’, this quote is essentially giving the artist a voice. If the artist has a voice and the power to say something in the work then shouldn’t they use it? Many contemporary artists today make work which shocks in order to raise a point. However, what shocks often offends somebody. It is clear that the line between challenging and offending is fine. 

The key term in our quote was ‘social responsibility’. Social means ‘suited to a polite and fashionable society’. We can then redefine polite, which means ‘refined and cultured’, which then goes to raise the question what is a refined painting? One of my group members came up with this when asked to define our key terms. I think that redefining ideas to see where your research leeds you is a really interesting way of working and finding new and exciting ideas. This is definitely something I’d like to try doing when doing my own research. 

This is Chris Ofili's 'Holy Virgin Mary' (1996). Ofili was raised as a Roman Catholic and he didn't like how over sexualised the Virgin Mary is in traditional representations found in places like the National Gallery. In order to raise people's awareness to this issue he has made his own explicit modern version. However, many people were offended by this work and thought it was sick, someone even tried to reck it by throwing white paint at the piece. I personally initially thought this too. I thought that Ofili had taken it one step too far and totally abandoned all social responsibility but it was interesting to see how my opinion of the piece changed as I discovered his original intensions. 

Another group looking at the same quote as us discussed how an artist's work can be taken out of context and made to look totally socially irresponsible regardless of the artist's initial intensions. They used the Author's fist meme as their example, a screenshot form the kid's program Author which has been repeatedly re-captioned and spread across social media. I thought that this idea was a really interesting one and it isn't one which my group discussed. This is something which happens a lot and perticularly within the recent meme phenomena.