After I sent that I remembered the technical definition of commercial art boils down to images produced for advertising. But I live in a town where the biggest museum patron is Eli Broad, the philharmonic plays in Disney Hall, and an mfa can cost more than a Cremaster dvd. When you think of that it seems there's no such thing as non-commercial art. Dennis Claxton
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Some rifts on the commerical divide...
Oh, this rabbit hole goes way deep. Right back to family arguments about why step dad didn't get a job in commercial art, say the studios or something. Here is a wiki on CalArts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Institute_of_the_Arts
This struggle was strange to grow up in. Stepdad1, got out of the Navy and bummed around LA and ran into moms, etc. He decided to go to art school and started USC, then moved Jepsen (I think it was cheaper). He couldn't get into UCLA because he didn't have an HS diploma. Chouinard was already the main commerical art school. So there were fights over money. The whole move to Mexico was to live better and cheaper, so SD1 enrolled at the Uni Guadalajara, where there they were teaching mural painting and Orozco style expressionism. If your familiar with his murals you can see just how anti-capitalist this stuff was---definitely not commerical art friendly.
All this commerical anti-commerical was still going on when I started school. The student word was getting into Chouinard was your meal ticket. CalArts was brand new, a funnel into the Disney empire---also funnel to the music business, studio back-up, etc. Some of this division was at Northridge between the design faction and the authentic faction. I stuck with authentic faction which included Ernest Freed, Saul Bernstein, and Hans Burkhardt. In the deeper mythology, part of the whole AE and expressionist movements were based on an anti-commerical art, anti-commercial society making it as hard to like as Bebop---anti-slick. Some of the painting techniques to really re-inforce this were using heavy impastos, mixed with sand, or later kitty litter.
Just about the middle of second year, a sales guy from Permenant Pigments or Liquitex showed up to give a presentation in one of my design classes. He showed this new stuff, acrylic artist paints. Back then the stuff didn't have enough saturation so mixing it produced muddy secondaries... more technical shit... I didn't like it. It looked like fake paint. It's gotten alot better, but it is still off, very slightly. The only usable stuff back then was gesso. I have to say painters who used water based acrylic usually lived longer.
Then there is the digital graphic imaging software systems that funnel into mass produced print and multi-media, or the audio systems, or the combined video systems. The output can be anything of course. But the experience of making this kind of art is so far removed from the way I learned, that I think it has transformed the whole cultural conceptual sphere.
I followed graffiti art for awhile in the early 90s when some of it was getting waay artty. Now they have graffiti software. That ain't right! One of the cool things about graffiti is how much practice it takes to pull off that heavily styled calligraphy. Try it and see.
CG