Does art shape culture and if so, is some art more desirable than others?

Art makes us feel a certain way. Makes us, perhaps, see the world in a certain way. This brings up a few questions.





-Is some art more desirable for society than others?


-Is some art more apt to develop desirables traits in a society than others?


-Does esthetics, in this case, become a political question?

Does art shape culture and if so, is some art more desirable than others?
The reason perhaps behind this question might be the fact that there is developing blurring of foundations and distinctions what is Art and what is culture, which once you step outside of any modern metropolis where fahsionable coffee shops and bookstores set-up the next "It", would not make sense.





I thought quoting one of Zizek's remarks could help clarify our postmodern appetite for trendy art galleries, bookstores, over-priced coffees, and in overall artsy preoccupations to the extent that Art already assumed the central mantelpiece of our desire that it became our "object petit a" of cultured-lifestyle:





"With the shift towards the tertiary economy (services, cultural goods), culture is less and less a specific sphere exempted from the market, and more and more not just one of the spheres of the market, but its central component (from the software amusemnt industry to other media productions). What this short circuit between market and culture entails is the waning of the old modernist avant-garde logic of provocation, of shocking the establishment.Today, more and more, the cultural-economic apparatus itself, in order to reproduce itself in competitve market conditions, has not only to tolerate but directly to provoke stronger and stronger shocking effects (previously reserved for solitary art pieces) and products. Just think of recent trends in the visual arts: gone are the days when we had simple statues or framed paintings-what we get now are exhibitions of frames without paitings, dead cows, videos of the insides of the human body (gastroscopy and colonscopy), the inclusion of olfactory effects, and so on. Here again, as in the domain of sexuality, perversion is no longer subversive: such schocking excesses are part of the system itself; the system feeds on them in order to reproduce itself. Perhaps this is one possible definition of postmodern as opposed to modernist art: in postmodernism, the transgressive excess loses its shock value and is fully integrated into the established artistic market".





Latest example: real life television show "Little People Big World"
Reply:Yes. But, exposure to art for most people is only "popular culture" which is debilitating culturally speaking. Whether real art varies in its impact and desirability is only known in retrospect. One can only hope that the negative results of "popular culture" - a result of growing communication technologies - will be outweighed in the long run by the "good" - whatever that may prove to be.
Reply:Art shapes culture, and culture shapes art. It's a two-way street.





I respect art that doesn't try and gloss over the problems of the world. While it shouldn't be completely devoid of hope, it shouldn't be afraid to show the dark, gritty underbelly of reality exactly for what it is.