OUGD401 - Print Culture & Distribution - Lecture

Marshall Mcluhan calls our current age the late age of print. This is down to the late stage of the life cycle which print is currently in. The history of print has been so influential and crucial to the development of culture in the working class man. Where art and culture was at one point exclusive to the upper class and wealthy, the invention of the printing press by Johannes Glutenberg in 1536 has allowed magazines, newspaper, posters, art and other media to be printed on a nationwide scale giving the opportunity for the working class to develop a unique culture and progress as creative thinkers.

In 1963 the working class and upper class first starts to get established because of the establishment and expansion of new tight knit city's and urban culture. The gallery's, art academy's and schools were off limits to the working class so they had to start developing their own culture using printing press. This in turn results in the development and progress in politics in working class culture. Rally's, unions and debates started to advance substantially in working class areas through the use of printing.

John Martin refused to go down the route of a traditional artist at the time by not attending the royal academy and individually painted the Belshazzar's Feast . He then promoted his own working class gallery selling mass produced prints of his painting. The revenue from this business venture was extraordinarily substantial which then inspired a market of re produced art to start to emerge.
This idea of working class culture was despised by the ruling class who thought that this new culture was a threat to English culture in general.
Schools of design then start to open which teach art culture to the working class. Before this the only people who could have an advanced education in art was the upper class students of the royal academy.

Walter Benjamin wrote 'The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction' in Germany, 1936. He asks the question, why do people let a horrendous unholy government come to power. He explores the idea that we tend to accept that someone is more talented and important than us. He relates this with accepting that a piece of art is a masterpiece just because someone tells us it is, he explains that this runs parallel with people telling us that our leader 'Hitler' is more important than us.

The invention of photography made the need for painting redundant, it made the idea of a portrait and immortalizing you forever available to everyone. Photography also introduced new media genres such as pornography and the mass amount money making of possibility's in the field of new work. What was only every available to the upper class in gallery's and exhibitions, was now brought to the working class and instead of going to gallery's and bowing down to the expenses of the ruling class, the working class can challenge these pretentious ideas.

In our modern age we tend to like letterpress as it reminds us that print is not just a mechanical digital printing but there is a person behind the print. I experienced this first hand at the Leeds Print Festival last Saturday.