The knowledge system of a society can be divided into two bodies of knowledge, shared and personal knowledge. Shared knowledge is a highly structured and systematic product of the knowledge of several individuals, and can be divided into the areas of knowledge, and is continually being contributed to by individuals. The thoughts of the individual is known as personal knowledge, which operates by means of the ways of knowing. Personal knowledge contrasts this in that it depends crucially on the experiences on the individual, while shared knowledge depends on the combined thoughts of societies as a whole. Art is an area of knowledge that is made up of context, content and craft, and bridges the gap between shared and personal knowledge. There are two parties in art; artist and spectator. Each party’s shared and personal knowledge encompass different things. For an artist, shared knowledge is the existing styles, genres, text types and movements, while for a spectator the shared knowledge is the context in which they’re experiencing the art (socio-political context, gallery vs. street etc…) Art shapes shared knowledge in three ways, the shared knowledge among artists shaping an individual artist's personal knowledge, through artistic influences and social inspiration. Both parties’ personal knowledge is the way in which they perceive their shared knowledge, for example emotional responses or developments in creativity. The shared knowledge of an artist can also shape the personal knowledge of the spectator, through manipulation of an individual's ways of knowing. Finally shared knowledge among spectators collectively shapes the personal knowledge of an individual spectator, through the hype surrounding pieces of art.
An artist's work is a product of several ways of knowing (such as imagination, emotion and sense perception) and can therefore be taken as a representation of their personal knowledge, and an artist’s influences are examples of this shared knowledge affecting their personal knowledge. Pablo Picasso, a famed artist who himself has contributed immensely to the shared knowledge of art, drew from existing bodies of art such as African art, symbolism, and impressionist artist Munch and many others. He later experimented with these by manipulating the angles and figures, and creating more abstract pieces. Here the shared knowledge of existing fields of knowledge and artistic genres, shaped Picasso’s personal knowledge by fueling his imagination. Here shared knowledge affects the content or craft of an artist’s work.
The second relationship is the artists shared knowledge affecting an individual's spectator’s personal knowledge, and is seen in the didactical goals of arts. For example Homer’s Iliad, a greek epic poem that shaped the moral upbringings of young men in ancient Greece. Here the virtues and principles of the society Homer was surrounded by was the shared knowledge, for example the ethics of his society, the history he had studied and the artistic culture in Greek civilization. Here the shared knowledge of an artist, shaped the personal knowledge of the individual spectator, through shaping their reason and intuition of what was right and wrong, through the shared knowledge acquired by the artist of ethics and history.
During the 1960s and 70s, the anti-Vietnam war movement caused a surge of art from those who opposed the war. Here the shared knowledge of a common reality fueled the social criticism of art at it’s time, and affected each artist's’ personal knowledge. Each artist interpreted the war through ways of knowing such as emotion and reason. Pieces of art such as Vietnam! Antonio Frasconi and poems such as Wichita Vortex Sutra by Allen Ginsberg had graphic imagery of the war in their work and Jimi Hendrix’s famous Star Spangled Banner also incorporated aural imagery of war. These examples show that shared knowledge shaped personal knowledge as it affected each artist's’ emotions and imagination, in turn resulting in similar sentiments in the spectators of these works, their popularity being evidence for the success of this shared knowledge shaping the audience’s personal knowledge.
The final way shared knowledge shapes personal, is the shared knowledge of the community of spectators shaping the personal knowledge of a single spectator. This is exemplified through the necessity for context in art’s justification as good or bad art. The Washington Post released a video in which Joshua Bell, a world renowned violinist, played in a New York subway station, and no one stopped to listen. This shows that because the shared knowledge of all the spectator’s were that art cannot exist in this context, the music wasn’t acknowledge as the art it would be if it was performed in a stadium for which tickets would be sold.
The truth is in actual fact more complex that a simple one way relationship. Shared and personal knowledge have a dynamic relationship as they each shape each other in some way or another. Personal knowledge in art shapes shared knowledge through an artist’s work manipulating masses of spectators. In my IB history class we have been discussing the ways in which Stalin maintained his power through propaganda of art and culture. Several Stalinist artists made art that advanced Stalin’s “cult of personality”, to manipulate the masses to indoctrinate them into his “cult”. We looked at many pieces of art but “the Results of the First Five Year Plan” by Varvara Stepanova stuck out to me, as it was the art was clearly a manipulation of facts to indoctrinate the soviet citizens. This mass manipulation is clearly a manipulation of shared knowledge, and as such shows that personal knowledge can shape shared knowledge. However even in this case, the manipulation may have been a result of many other things such as fear and lack of education, more than it could have been about the art’s impact. Ultimately shared knowledge shapes personal knowledge in art, through the shared knowledge of artists providing inspiration for an artist's personal knowledge, the shared knowledge of the artist affecting the personal knowledge through shaping of ways of knowing, and the shared knowledge of collective spectators affecting an individual's interpretation of a piece of work.
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