The advancement of mass media promotes a consumer culture that is based on the development of capitalist economy and urban environments. Mass media, with its powerful influence on the contemporary visual landscape of urban centers, has reshaped our current era into "the age of the image." While mass media has now become a fundamental factor in defining contemporary visual culture, fine art (which was traditionally at the center of cultural image production) is struggling to find its identity as it continues to engage in our lives and culture. This thesis examines the relationship between art and the expansion of mass media in South Korea from 1980 to 1997 when the country first entered the media age. The main objective is to examine the ways art produces images and the authority implied by those images, while also observing the changes in the social function of art over the years. This thesis focuses on the period between 1980 and 1997, the former being when color television was first introduced in Korea and the latter shortly before high speed internet service was launched. In the political sphere, the period was marked by strong public resistance against the surveillance and oppression of the new military government, and the subsequent democratization of the country (achieved through civic movements) allowed for unprecedented power being given to the voice of the citizens. From an economic perspective, the country’s rapid economic growth led to its complete transition into a capitalist society maintained by mass production and mass consumption, thereby rapidly expanding the number of consumers with purchasing power. The period also underwent unprecedented historical transition in the global context. The end of the Cold War shortly after the 1990s came to establish a new, market-oriented world order under the slogan of globalism that shifted away from political ideologies. Moreover, the advancement of media technology accelerated the distribution of electronic media and devices including photography, video, television, computer and the internet. As a result, a wide range of information and entertainment contents became unrestricted by temporal and spatial boundaries. Opening up a new era of the "global village," the period also witnessed the historical shift from text-based to image-based culture. These changes across society also led to ground breaking changes in the realm of art. Mainly, the concept of the medium began to shift from being mere material of the work to a means of communication. Coinciding with the new age of mass media, the medium theory of communication placed more emphasis on social theory, focusing on the social function of the medium, as opposed to technological determinism highlighting its technological aspects. Furthermore, a younger generation of artists who grew up with popular culture began to emerge at the end of the 1980s. This new generation of artists departed from the traditional values of their predecessors, and stressed the individual over the collective, and freedom over authority while expressing a wholly new sensibility. The cultural importance of this generation was that they embodied the new zeitgeist in the age of the image. Considering the conceptual shift of the medium, and the emergence of a new generation of artists during the spread of mass media during the period between 1980 and 1997, this thesis examines the changes in art that took place by identifying three distinct tendencies. The first is a group of works reacting to the images produced and distributed by mass media. These works appropriated images from the media using various techniques such as juxtaposition, collage, photo-montage and pastiche, or subverted the conventions of the media practice and at times employed elements of kitsch. The works often dealt with images of the expanding urban metropolis and the problems of everyday life, as well as the portrayal and use of the female body in media. The second is a group of works that incorporate the visual media and electronic devices utilized by mass media. These works explored photography through its possibilities of mechanical reproduction and simulacrum, and examined its strategies of reproduction and appropriation, thereby allowing the medium to establish itself as a formal language of contemporary art. Furthermore, installation (which became one of the key factors in the fall of modernism) created comprehensive messages and images by integrating a diverse range of everyday objects and media. In reaction to the explosion of mass media it was faced with, the debate over the practice of installation during this time focused more on the contextual and communicative aspect than its spatiality and site-specificity. In addition, film, video and various new media, based on advanced technology and electronic devices, began to emerge. These works displayed tendencies towards nature, environment and tradition in their use of advanced media. The third centers on the wave of institutional critique and heightened emphasis on culture generated by the shifting concept of art and the debates surrounding them. The boundaries between high art and pop culture became increasingly blurred, and the realm of fine art soon expanded across visual art and visual culture. The field of cultural studies began to flourish, and cultural awareness likewise evolved as a result. Cultural studies, which first gained momentum in the 1990s, emphasized the importance of culture being equal to politics and economy. Its currents generated widespread interest in the realm of visual culture and elements of everyday life including commodity consumption, leisure, advertisement and mass media. Fine art was eventually replaced by the term "visual culture" and art criticism was no longer limited to the artwork itself but more broadly concerned the overall environment of artistic production under the field of cultural studies. The changes in art examined above lead to more fundamental paradigm shifts in the art world. First, there is the conceptual shift and expansion of art. Since entering the age of mass media, the boundaries between high art and pop culture became increasingly unclear, while in the art world, the term "visual art" or "visual culture" more frequently replaced "fine art." These terms referred to the overall realms of art and culture, including images of pop culture and everyday life that form the basis of visual hierarchy in the age of mass media. This was not simply a matter of terminology but reflected the ongoing changes in the concept and scope of art. Moreover, it indicated that the scope of art was not only changing in its form and content but also expanding in its function. Therefore, unlike in the past when artworks were limited to the traditional realms of painting and sculpture, art criticism now extended beyond the artwork itself to include the sociocultural environment behind the work’s production as well as its process of communication, establishing a new practice of institutional critique. This new form of criticism strived for changes in the communication structure, through which it cautiously guarded art from succumbing to commercialism and branching out into the cultural industry, while at the same time encouraging art to stand apart from the images of mass media and seek its own position through a critical stance. Secondly, another aspect of change is the heightened emphasis on communication. Escaping the modernist paradigm focusing on artistic introspection over social relation, art in the age of mass media attempted to converge on everyday life and reality, as the spectacle of images brought on by the mass media forced art to change its conventional ways of communication. This new emphasis on communication clearly demonstrated alarming awareness against the overwhelming flood of the media, and it firmly established itself as one of the central tenets of the art world. In other words, when discussing the kitsch style of the new generation artists, or works utilizing technology-based visual media, and even with installation works, the South Korean art world at the time tended to group these different tendencies altogether under the single keyword, "communication," despite that each type of works maintained individual context and trajectory in Western art history. The strong focus on the communicative role of art eventually provided grounds for extended emphasis on narrative and context that characterized contemporary art in the following years. The third aspect of change is the expansion of the artistic medium and its reception. Media art, including video, sound, installation and other complex forms, extended beyond the visual and presented a synesthetic experience that requires the viewer’s auditory and tactile perception among other senses. The viewing experience of the work not only redefined the concept of temporality, but moreover, the context, site and space of the installation became crucial elements in the interpretation of the work. In the case of interactive works, where the aesthetic distance between the viewer and the work is eliminated, the work completes itself on site through the participation of the viewer. Therefore, the role of the viewer no longer remained passive but formed an interactive relationship with the artwork. Likewise, in the production of the work, the long-held conventions of the artist’s studio as the site of production and completion became challenged by viewer intervention. These conceptual shifts regarding the production, distribution and reception of artworks brought forth new concepts into the art world, such as the death of the author, diversity of interpretation, post-production, etc., that leapt beyond the dichotomy of the artist and the audience, or the creator and the viewer. As outlined above, this thesis examines the strategies of art in relation to the shifting perception of public and popular culture in South Korea between 1980 and 1997, a transformative period during which democratization, rapid economic growth and modernization, and subsequently, an explosion of mass media took place. Art in the age of mass media brings forth a new paradigm that departs from the conventional mechanisms of the art world, and those newly established concepts and paradigms now form the framework of art today. In this context, the examination of art and its response during the expansion of mass media culture may provide a more fundamental understanding on the origin of contemporary art and contemporaneity. ，韩语论文题目，韩语毕业论文 |
