Who Killed Culture

From barbarism to democracy, elites seek a suspect in the reported death of art.

Charles Paul Freund from the March 1998 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Members of that group have failed to understand what is happening to them. Their problem isn't that somebody (profiteers) or something (the marketplace) is undermining culture. Their problem is culture.

We are accustomed to identifying culture with the class that has long been its arbiter: the critics, publishers, editors, museum and gallery curators, theatrical impresarios, teachers, cultural historians, and others who have been the judges and gatekeepers of what is supposedly deserving, praiseworthy, and lasting, and what is merely "popular" and therefore disposable. The history of this class--and its power to dispose of the culture it deems inferior--is a very long one. In antiquity, for example, it created the Alexandrian Canon of 56 worthy poets, and the even more limited canon of the 10 Attic Orators whose voices we have been allowed to hear; we can only speculate on what has been lost as a result. (On the other hand, the old grammarians entirely ignored the popular Hellenistic proto-novelists such as Longus--from whose Daphnis and Chloe pastorale was born--that so influenced the Renaissance and ultimately our own literature when some of these works resurfaced.) The same class is still drawing up reading lists, only now their power of cultural enforcement is waning. Why?

The answer lies in the continuing diffusion of cultural power. When art moved from the court to the city in the 18th century (earlier in the case of Holland), the character of culture changed substantially. Creators were no longer beholden to their patrons; armed with talent (and developing copyright law), they could seek and address an audience of like-minded persons. They entered a market. This market could be both merciless and exploitive, but one result was an unprecedented explosion of creativity--fine, mediocre, and unspeakable--that is still continuing.

Another result, however, was the reorganization of cultural hierarchy. With the aristocracy irrelevant, a class of educated admirers--critics with cultivated taste--came forward to acknowledge the artists as visionaries and to offer themselves as their interpreters. This alliance of creators and critics, often in conjunction with business (later corpo-
rate) philanthropists making spiritual amends for their fortunes, has ever since been in control of the history, development, and instruction of cultural matters.

This control has been based not on any temporal power but on the enormous status that the cultural establishment had been allotted by the middlebrows. Just as the new-monied classes of industrialism sought to ape the aristocracy above them, the emerging middle classes sought to ape the culture of the stratum over their own heads. Having achieved material well-being, the middle classes sought culture, and culture, they agreed, was whatever the high-end establishment of critics, curators, and so forth said it was.

Thus, whatever a middlebrow audience in the middle of the 20th century may have enjoyed watching, hearing, or reading, it acknowledged that it should know third-stream jazz or the 12-tone music of Schönberg when it heard it; that it should have an opinion about what, if anything, happened in a film like Last Year at Marienbad; that it should appreciate pointed eventlessness in the plays of Samuel Beckett (or even the impossibility of drama in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni); that it should understand why New York painters were attempting to achieve absolute flatness; and that it should sample the latest efforts of European writers to produce the New Novel. The question of enjoying such things was really not an issue, as it had been when the fine arts were defined
in the 18th century; culture by midcentury had become a matter of modernist intellectual heavy lifting. The striving middlebrow audience in its heyday would have been quite willing to admit that, for example, those films it did enjoy were probably of no lasting value anyway, even as it scanned the movie ads for a blurb from a serious film critic advising readers of the latest, must-see work of significance.

But today's serious film critics are largely beside the point, and the art films they praise (including work by such adventurous Eastern European directors as Emir Kusturica) draw small audiences on those occasions when they can even find a distributor. Cable TV offers scores of services, but the only dedicated elite cable service to survive is Bravo (and its Independent Film Channel). PBS's approach to opera is now dominated by famous tenors belting out show tunes in sports stadiums. Literary fiction is famous for being unread, and even new work by such established writers as Thomas Pynchon creates little stir, however enthusiastic the reviews. Popular magazines are devoting less and less space to writers and artists, and serious general interest magazines can no longer support themselves. The role of the elite establishment is visibly shrinking.

Why? Cultivated elites are still there, but it is middlebrow culture that empowered them, and middlebrow culture is in steep decline. Techno-logical innovation is redrawing cul-
ture's sociological map. Cable, VCRs,
satellites, and the multidimensional changes wrought by the home computer have not only opened a vast array of new cultural choices to people, they are achieving something much larger: They are moving the consumption of culture out of the city and into the home. Cultural activity is becoming increasingly a private rather than a public matter, and the more culture is a private concern, the less status
has anything to do with it. In private, people will immerse themselves in the culture they want. Thus culture--stripped of status concerns and reduced to authentic desire--is stranding elites in their own subculture.

What is going on at the top of the cultural ladder is even more obvious at the bottom, because at the bottom it isn't obscured by the elitist coverage of the surviving prestige press. At the bottom of the cultural hierarchy are such things as pornographic films. As recently as 20 years ago, porno films were a public issue. Their titles and contents were matters of public discussion, and the people who appeared in them could become notorious (as did Linda Lovelace) or even celebrated (as was Marilyn Chambers). But the VCR revolution has moved porno films almost completely into the home; they have less and less of a public dimension at all, beyond video store zoning battles. At this point, the films' makers and their audience constitute a self-contained subculture of interest primarily to themselves.

Something similar is happening on the top, avant-garde rung of the cultural ladder. (Indeed, exactly the same thing has happened to the once-lively repertory film circuit; classic films have become an at-home experience.) High culture, dominated, in the NEA's words, by the subsidized museum, concert hall, and proscenium stage, possesses its own obvious validity and exerts its own power. Whether anything happened in Marienbad may remain a legitimate cinematic question, at least as interesting as whether Agent Mulder is, yet again, dead. But there's no status cost in shrugging off such a question, and an increasing number of people have done so.

With cultural power dispersed, there are many such cultural subcultures asserting themselves. One man who recognized their validity long ago was sociologist Herbert J. Gans; he called them "taste cultures." In 1974, Gans offered a rare challenge to the standard cultural critique of negative classicism. There is nothing wrong, he argued, with a mass audience seeking pleasure in the mass media. It does not mean that that audience is to be despised, or that its imagination has been enslaved by cunning profiteers. It means only that different groups have different--and legitimate--cultural needs. Gans argued that the country featured numerous such cultures (he identified five, corresponding to class and income), and, in words that were to assure that his argument was completely ignored, added that "all taste classes are equal."

Gans was not suggesting that soap operas were interchangeable with Sophocles. But he did mean that measuring one by the other was a distortion of cultural reality, and in this he was right. Where he may have been wrong was to identify so few taste cultures and to suggest that people would spend their aesthetic lives inside only one. With gatekeepers gone and the gates wide open, people are as likely to wander around in many taste cultures; to move, for example, in both high art and pornographic circles. As historian Lisa Jardine points out, the Renaissance painter Titian, glory of Venice and purveyor of soft-core voluptuousness, was just such a figure.

As for those angry gatekeepers dressed in mourning, they might take comfort in contemplating their founding tastemaker, Baldassare Castiglione, and the fate of the courtier at the end of his world. Castiglione, arbiter of even-tempered cultivation and smooth wit, was also a man of worldly action--a papal envoy--and a disastrously bad one. His bumbling, based on conflating style with sincerity, was a factor in one of the great political and cultural catastrophes of his age, the terrible Sack of Rome in 1527. Revealingly, Castiglione emerged from that collision with reality by abandoning the very philosophy of character that so influenced later ages. The last letters he wrote before dying (of embarrassment, according to some) display a man of disfiguring temper and debasing bitterness. But then, the realization that the power of taste lies so entirely in the deference of others is an embittering epiphany. The last of the courtiers, his elegant progeny, are slouching off stage in bad temper. Give them credit for exiting in character.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.15.10 @ 10:19PM|#

xththjk

log in or register to reply

nfl jerseys|11.15.10 @ 10:19PM|#

xththjk

log in or register to reply