Aesthetics/Vernacular

I think it is difficult to draw a bright line between the vernacular and the aesthetic. Helmers divides the two in terms of naïve vs. knowledgeable viewers. Helmers seems to be talking about the “Aesthetic” with a capital “A,” meaning a specifically defined museum or Artworld (also with a capital “A”) conceptualization of aesthetic experience, context/frame of reference, and evaluation criteria, which together comprise what Helmers calls “appropriate socially coded levels of seeing” (82). Although Helmers clearly has issues with this idea of the Aesthetic, in terms of how it operates as what Goggin would call a class-bound threshold separating Artworld insiders and outsiders, Helmers’ division of naïve and knowledgeable viewers fails to recognize the conscious aesthetic frameworks that define so-called vernacular visual expressions. Goggin’s history of samplers, especially their early history in which samplers were used and circulated as inventive sources for creating images, demonstrates their aesthetic framework – their media, techniques, contexts, and criteria for judging quality.

Perhaps what makes needlework, as opposed to oil painting, vernacular is its grassroots, non-Artworld origin. So, is vernacular imagery defined as non-Artworld imagery? But don’t many non-Artworld image-making contexts have their own aesthetic thresholds that divide insiders from outsiders? Josh talked about graffiti as a vernacular artform. In one sense, I can agree – it is grassroots, urban, and outside formal systems of Artworld support. However, graffiti writers (yeah, they’re called writers, since much of their imagery includes words – talk about your semasiographic vs. glottographic systems!) operate within highly coded contexts that function aesthetically and territorially – i.e., tagging. As an outsider to the graffiti scene, I might be able to construct my own narratives to make meaning from graffiti I see and admire, but I lack the graffiti-specific aesthetic knowledge to “fully” understand it.