Cultural Hegemony The artist as a hegemonic representation in Mass Media Culture

Hegemony and Cultural Hegemony in Post-industrial Societies Growing power over people and maintaining this power, has always been a dark aspect of the human nature. Social classes, tribes or nations, even individuals were always trying to impose their views over the others, through violence or through more subtle methods such as distortion of the way one saw himself or his group, or more commonly through cultural domination. Cultural domination or imposition is actually not something new, rather something so subtle that one rarely perceives for the main reason that when exerted it becomes the very fabric of our social reality. Civilizations were very aware of that power of cultural domination and the way this domination assimilates people under one common reality that is easily manipulated. Actually, writing this essay in English rather than in any other language is a sign of the English lingual domination. Gramsci, realized that controlling the cultural perspective of a group one was dominating the way the group perceives the world (Gramsci, Hoare, & Smith, 1971). By ascribing or distorting the meaning of a cultural aspect, by redefining its value and creating a norm, someone is able to control and modify without any use of violence and more importantly without any resistance, the whole reality of a group of people (Gramsci, Hoare, & Smith, 1971). In the post-industrial societies, such hegemonic control is being imposed on us through mass media, to promote consumerist culture. So we tend to see a globalized culture with values defined by the media, instead of local cultures with values defined by their own social constructs. Such globalized cultures are easily manipulated by the media into consumerism that benefit the elite, industrial classes (Artz & Kamalipour, 2003). Media are constantly producing images, stereotypes representatives of an idea, a feeling, a role or an identity that is to be consumed (rather than created) by the mass (Debord, 1994). By creating these representational images, media impose on us the way that they want us to see the world or the way we want to be seen by it. In other words, they create the hegemonic language in which we transmit the messages of ourselves, the way we understand ourselves, communicate ourselves and consequently define our social identity and roles through a manufactured representational image (Debord, 1994). Briefly, in our mass consuming iconic culture, such archetypes are being reproduced in media as hegemonic images and people tend to be identified in accordance to them. In this essay, I am trying to understand the way the artist stereotype is represented and reproduced under the hegemonic mass media culture.

The Artist Archetype and how it is being represented in Numb video clip by Linkin Park One particular social role/archetype, which in accordance to my belief is being the most affected by the hegemonic rule of the media, is that of the artist. Artists were not always considered to be eccentric people striving for meaning and authenticity, marginalized and always against the mainstream. Throughout the modernism, they were generally considered geniuses, visionaries and they held generally an indisputable role in culture. In other words they were a group defined by a hegemonic cultural archetype much different of that we know today. Dada art movement was actually the first artistic movement to question that hegemonic stereotype of the genius modern artist and the authority he held. Marcel Duchamp, through his work fountain showed first, that artist as a social role was not something indisputable. From that time on, the social role of the artist has been replaced by the archetype of the rebel artist, which no one understands and is continuously rebelling against anything authoritarian. Ironically, this rebellious archetype is now an authority, part of the hegemony of the mass media that represent the artists as rebels and part of the counter-culture movement. An interesting example of the cultural hegemony of the mass media of the representation of rebel artist archetype is being portrayed in the video clip of the song numb by Linkin park (Hahn, 2003), where here through the counter-culture aesthetics of the song is constructed a representation of the artist (Link to the Youtube site of the videoclip is included in bibliography). Moreover the lyrics of the song are inducing a way of feeling, thinking and consequently way of living that adds to the ultimate image of the postmodern artist. The irony here is that the counter-culture and counter-hegemonic perspective of this music video clip ultimately becomes the culture and the actual hegemonic message. More specifically, the video is portraying an artistic girl, probably in school or university. The girl besides being artistic and creative is being seen as a misfit, different, self-absorbed and a loner. Moreover she seems to have problems with authority (0:30) and she is being bullied. This exact representation of what an artistic person is, can easily be found in every media product such as the movies (Boden & Fleck, 2010; Wiesen, 2011; Zwigoff, 2001), something that testifies that a hegemonic media archetype is constructed to represent a group of people. The interesting about that hegemonic artist representation is that the artist is being portrayed as striving against the mainstream culture in other words against the hegemony of that culture, something that I find deeply ironic.

Society of the Spectacle and the hegemonic artist stereotype Guy Debord, a French Marxist theorist and artist was concerned about the way mass produced images created by the media had embedded a constructed (by the industrial culture) meaning of a model of social interaction that tended to gradually replace the original social meaning, with meanings that benefited that industrial elite culture "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." (Debord, 1994). Guy Debord, also argues that social life in our postindustrial society is characterized by the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing (Debord, 1994). In accordance to that, I believe that this concept can be applied into my statements above referring to the artist stereotype under the hegemonic mass media culture. Social Identity, and social roles in general, nowadays, are not seem to be social constructs but rather media constructs, iconic statements about these social constructs. So nowadays one is not being an artist, but rather having (adopting an image from the media) the identity of an artist, and because this is an image one appears to be an artist, in other words just adopting the hegemonic image of an artist is more valid than any other social definition of the artist stereotype.

Bibliography

Artz, L., & Kmalipour, R. Y. (2003). The Globalization of Corporate Media Hegemony. New York: State University of New York Press.

Boden, A., & Fleck, R. (Directors). (2010). It's Kind of a Funny Story [Motion Picture].

Debord, G. (1994). Society of the Spectacle. New York : Zone Books.

Gramsci, A., Hoare, Q., & Smith, N. G. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London : Lawrence & Wishart.

Hahn, J. (Director). (2003). numb [Motion Picture] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXYiU_JCYtU on 09, October, 2013.

retrieved

from:

Wiesen, G. (Director). (2011). The Art of Getting By [Motion Picture].

Zwigoff, T. (Director). (2001). Ghost World [Motion Picture].