 Introduction: Popular Culture and High Art
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Records and 7-Up
Records and 7-Up give the fizz to a middle-class teenage pyjama party. The ability of teenagers to claim and construct their own domestic space was thought of more in social terms in the US than elsewhere. View larger
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The Industrial Revolution had taken work out of the home into the factory and office. The home became a place of male leisure, serviced by women, at the same time that many things that had once been made at home were now bought in stores. Offering objects for leisurely use in the home, advertising - the form of popular culture that is most concemed to sell the satisfactions it promised - was primarily addressed to women.
The consumer was usualiy viewed by producers and eritics alike as female. In part there was good reason for this: women were responsible for as much as 85 percent of consumer spending. Middle-class women constituted a new leisure class, spending their time at shops, theater matinees and hairdressers.
The ethos of sensuality cooperated with the cosmetic industry to insist on the "natural right" of American woman' to be beautiful. In the 1920s the "flapper" as a beautiful American woman was a ubiquitous advertising image. She was, as social historian Stuart Ewan put it, "Pure consumer, busy dancing through the world of modem goods. She was youth, marked by energy not judgement. Her clothes, her vehicles, her entire milieu was mass-produced - and she liked it."
It was because "mass culture" was addressed particularly to women that it was amatter of anxiety. The "masses" were taken to have exclusively "feminine" characteristics: they were irrational, capricious, passive, and conformist. Like women, the masses would respond only to emotional appeals and "raw sensation".
The cultural objects designed for them could not, in the eyes of elite male critics such as Dwight Macdonald or the poet TS. Eliot, qualify as art. Macdonald was disturbed by what he called Gresham's Law in Culture, by which "bad stuff drives out the good by mimicking and debasing the forms of High Art". His colleague Clement Greenberg, writing in 1946, argued in similar terms, that "Mass Culture pre-digests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a shortcut to the pleasures of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art". Although in some respects this argument echoed the position of blacks who claimed that "whitening-up" their music had deprived it of its essence, it was more forcefully a defense of cultural elitism against the contamination from the hands of a larger and more "vulgar" audience.
The debates over "mass culture" arose from the occupation, by commercial enterprises such as the cinema, of territoy'y previously reserved for elite culture by its designation as art.The description of mass culture as feminine depended on the actual exclusion of women from high culture and its institutions. Thus mass culture could be declared trivial and dangerous at the same time, symptomatic of and responsible for all the social ills of life under capitalism. Veblen had described how "expensive vices" were reserved for the rich and forbidden to others.
What was at stake in this debate, as in the recurrent concems of critics over the censorship of what their social inferiors consumed, was the question of where cultural power was situated in Westem democracies. The "democracy of images" protected the political and economic elite from social criticism, but it equaliy endangered their role as protectors of "culture".
So they constantly disparaged the effects of "mass culture" as moraliy corrupting. That argument was applied equaliy to dime novels and to skirt lengths or movies, but it was always couched in terms of a discussion of the effects on the mentaliy and moraliy deficient - children and "morons" - of objects that were not fully under the control of the cultural elite. At its root was a middle-elass fear that there was no controlover the behavior and values of the lower orders. Against this denunciation of "nickel madness", there arose a counter-argument, couched in terms of the definition of "entertainment" as "harmless".
In 1916 the Supreme Court adjudged that movies were not to be permitted the free speech protections of the First Amendment, because they were "a business pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit...not to be regarded as part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion. They are mere representations of events, of ideas, and sentiments published or known, vivid, useful, and entertaining, no doubt, but... capable of evil, having power for it, the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition."
The activity of regulating entertainment, whether through censorship, mechanisms such as the Motion Picture Production Code, or less official devices, constituted an attempt to render the potentially harmful object harmless, but throughout, this was a debate conducted among the cultural elite about what might be permitted to the lower classes, whose opinions were seldom directly requested.
As capitalist producers, the major companies and the financial forces behind them had strong vested interests in having their product regarded as merely a harmless form of entertainment too inconsequential to merit state interference or regulation. As advertising had to argue that it influenced consumer choice but did not otherwise affect people's lives, the movies had to bluff their way through the contradictory arguments that while they provided their audiences with immediate pleasurable experiences, they did not cause people to behave differently in any important way. Such an argument was even more convincing if movie content appeared superficial, "escapist" and irrelevant to the world outside the movie theater.
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Introduction
