THE ARTS AND THE MASS MEDIA
Lawrence Alloway
In Architectural
Design last December there was a discussion
of "the problem
that faces the architect to-day - democracy face to face with hugeness - mass
society, mass housing, universal mobility." The architect is not the only
kind of person in this position; everybody who works for the public in a creative
capacity is face to face with the manyheaded monster. There are heads and to
spare.
Before 1800 the population of Europe was an estimated 180
million; by 1900 this
figure had risen to 460 million. The increase of population and the industrial
revolution that paced it have, as everybody knows, changed the world. In the
arts, however, traditional ideas have persisted, to limit the definition of
later developments. As Ortega pointed
out in The Revolt
of the Masses: "the
masses are to-day exercising functions in social life which coincide with those
which
hitherto seemed reserved to minorities." As a result the élite,
accustomed to set aesthetic standards, has found that it no longer possesses
the power
to dominate all aspects of art. It is in this situation that we need to consider
the arts of the mass media. It is impossible to see them clearly within a code
of asthetics associated with minorities with pastoral and upperclass ideas
because
mass art is urban and democratic.
It is no good giving a literary critic modern
science fiction to review, no good sending the theatre critic to the movies,
and no good asking the music
critic
for an opinion on Elvis
Presley. Here is an example of what happens to critics
who approach mass art with minority assumptions. John
Wain, after listing some
of the spectacular characters in P. C. Wren's Beau
Geste observes: "It
sounds rich. But in fact - as the practised reader could easily foresee ...
it is not
rich. Books with this kind of subject matter seldom are. They are lifeless,
petrified by the inert conventions of the adventure yarn." In fact, the
practised reader is the one who understands the conventions of the work he
is reading.
From outside all Wain can see are inert conventions; from inside the view is
better and from inside the conventions appear as the containers of constantly
shifting values and interests.
The Western
movie, for example, often quoted
as timeless and ritualistic, has since the end of World
War II been highly
flexible. There have been cycles
of psychological Westerns (complicated characters, both the heroes and the
villains),
anthropological Westerns (attentive to Indian rights and rites), weapon Westerns
(Colt revolvers and repeating Winchesters as analogues of the present armament
race). The protagonist has changed greatly, too: the typical hero of the
American depression who married the boss's daughter and so entered the bright
archaic
world of the gentleman has vanished. The ideal of the gentleman has expired,
too, and with it evening dress which is no longer part of the typical hero-garb.
If
justice is to be done to the mass arts which are, after all, one of the most
remarkable and characteristic achievements of industrial society, some
of the
common objections to them need to be faced. A summary of the opposition to
mass popular art is in Avant
Garde and Kitsch (Partisan
Review, 1939, Horizon, 1940),
by Clement Greenberg, an art critic and a good one, but fatally prejudiced
when he leaves modern fine art. By kitsch he means "popular, commercial
art and literature, with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations,
advertisements, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tapdancing,
Hollywood movies, etc." All these activities to Greenberg
and the minority he speaks for are "ersatz culture ... destined for those
who are insensible to the value of genuine culture ... Kirsch, using for raw
material
the debased and academic simulacra of genuine culture welcomes and cultivates
this insensibility". Greenberg insists that "all kitsch
is academic," but only some of it is, such as Cecil
B. De Mille-type historical
epics which use nineteenth-century history-picture material. In fact, stylistically,
technically, and iconographically the mass arts are anti-academic. Topicality
and a rapid rate of change are not academic in any usual sense of the word,
which means a system that is static, rigid, self-perpetuating. Sensitiveness
to the
variables of our life and economy enable the mass arts to accompany the changes
in our life far more closely than the fine arts which are a repository of time-binding
values.
The popular arts of our industrial civilization are geared to technical
changes which occur, not gradually, but violently and experimentally. The
rise of the
electronics era in communications challenged the cinema. In reaction to the
small TV screen, movie makers spread sideways (CinemaScope) and back into
space (Vista
Vision). All the regular film critics opposed the new array of shapes, but
all have been accepted by the audiences. Technical change as dramatized novelty
(usually
spurred by economic necessity) is characteristic not only of the cinema but
of all the mass arts. Colour TV, the improvements in colour printing (particularly
in American magazines), the new range of paper back books; all are part of
the
constant technical improvements in the channels of mass communication.
An important
factor in communication in the mass arts is high redundancy. TV plays, radio
serials, entertainers, tend to resemble each other (though there
are important and clearly visible differences for the expert consumer). You
can go into the movies at any point, leave your seat, eat an ice-cream, and
still
follow the action on the screen pretty well. The repetitive and overlapping
structure of modern entertainment works in two ways: (1) it permits marginal
attention
to suffice for those spectators who like to talk, neck, parade; (2) it satisfies,
for the absorbed spectator, the desire for intense participation which leads
to a careful discrimination of nuances in the action. There is in popular art
a continuum from data to fantasy. Fantasy resides in, to sample a few examples,
film stars, perfume ads, beauty and the beast situations, terrible deaths,
sexy women. This is the aspect of popular art which is most easily accepted
by art
minorities who see it as a vital substratum of the folk, as something primitive.
This notion has a history since Herder in the eighteenth century, who emphasized
national folk arts in opposition to international classicism. Now, however,
mass-produced folk art is international: Kim
Novak, Galaxy Science Fiction,
Mickey Spillane,
are available wherever you go in the West. However, fantasy is always given
a keen topical edge; the sexy model is shaped by datable fashion as well as
by
timeless lust. Thus, the mass arts orient the consumer in current styles, even
when they seem purely, timelessly erotic and fantastic. The mass media give
perpetual lessons in assimilation, instruction in role-taking, the use of new
objects,
the definition of changing relationships, as David
Riesman has pointed out.
A clear example of this may be taken from science fiction. Cybernetics, a new
word
to many people until 1956, was made the basis of stories in Astounding
Science Fiction in 1950. SF aids the assimilation of the mounting technical facts of
this century in which, as John
W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, put it, "A
man learns a pattern of behavior - and in five years it doesn't work." Popular
art, as a whole, offers imagery and plots to control the changes in the world;
everything in our culture that changes is the material of the popular arts.
Critics of the mass media often complain of the hostility towards intellectuals
and the lack of respect for art expressed there, but, as I have tried to show,
the feeling is mutual. Why should the mass media turn the other cheek? What
worries intellectuals is the fact that the mass arts spread; they encroach
on the high ground. For example, into architecture itself as Edmund
Burke Feldman wrote in Arts
and Architecture last October: "Shelter, which began as
a necessity, has become an industry and now, with its refinements, is a popular
art." This, as Feldman points out, has been brought about by "a democratization
of taste, a spread of knowledge about non-material developments, and a shift
of authority about manners and morals from the few to the many." West
Coast domestic architecture has become a symbol of a style of living as well
as an
example of architecture pure and simple; this has occurred not through the
agency of architects but through the association of stylish interiors with
leisure and
the good life, mainly in mass circulation magazines for women and young marrieds.
The
definition of culture is changing as a result of the pressure of the great
audience, which is no longer new but experienced in the consumption of its
arts. Therefore, it is no longer sufficient to define culture solely as something
that
a minority guards for the few and the future (though such art is uniquely
valuable and as precious as ever). Our definition of culture is being stretched
beyond
the fine art limits imposed on it by Renaissance theory, and refers now,
increasingly, to the whole complex of human activities. Within this definition,
rejection
of the mass produced arts is not, as critics think, a defence of culture
but an
attack on it. The new role for the academic is keeper of the flame; the new
role for the fine arts is to be one of the possible forms of communication
in an expanding
framework that also includes the mass arts.
Architectural Design & Construction, February 1958:
84,-85
