An Analysis of the Cultural Production of Meaning

Art, therefore, is very much a product, expression, symbol, and commentary upon the artist and the society in which the artist exists. Geertz (1983) believes that to study art forms is to explore a sensibility that is itself a collective formation whose foundations are as wide as social existence and as deep. Regardless of the specific culture or social system in which a work of art or an art form is developed, that art work or form says a great deal about the culture in which it was produced.

The unity of form and content found in art forms is understood by Geertz (1983) as a cultural achievement and not as a philosophical tautology. It is this particular achievement, manifested in the unity of form and content, that must be the semiotic experience of art. To understan

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illusionist perspective. Such art ignores the treatment of space that was typical of the realist paintings of an earlier era, the classical work of ancient Rome and Greece, and the neoclassical, humanist art forms of the High Renaissance. To a degree, abstract expressionism foreshadowed the emergence of pop art in the United States in the 1960s, which Edward Lucie-Smith (1975) considers to have been an attempt to revalidate purely realistic painting. If Geertz (1983) is correct in his assertion that art cannot be separated from culture, then it becomes necessary for the art historian or student to recognize what was occurring in the world when Pollock created such works as "Broadway Boogie Woogie." What seems to be present in the work of artists like Pollock is the idea of a continuous dynamic which reflected the rapid movement and greater mobility which came to characterize American and Western society in the years following World War II. In commenting on the work of artists like Pollock, Clement Greenberg (1961) makes the point that the abstract expressionists produced work that was the first manifestation of American art to draw a protest domestically and serious attention from Europe. To the degree that these arti
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Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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