Popular Culture and High Culture
Asahina, Robert
candidates than it is to raise money for public policy issues, and it is still more difficult to raise money for fundamental research and writing of the kind engaged in by the Webbs—the kind that...
...It is simple-minded, boring, pretentious, and dull...
...This seems to me to be just the reverse of what it ought to be...
...and (3) creating the needed culture...
...But why do they keep raising their ugly head...
...candidates than it is to raise money for public policy issues, and it is still more difficult to raise money for fundamental research and writing of the kind engaged in by the Webbs—the kind that ultimately determines the prevailing ideology...
...The reason is that businessmen and others do not turn their attention to the situation until it is bad...
...Our foundation and the Institute adhere to that unglamorous, long-run approach which is essential to return freedom to us...
...That's director Francis Ford Coppola's understated way of telling us how the gringos were carving up Cuba and exploiting it before Castro...
...Occasionally he whispers and sometimes he shouts...
...The real losers, of course, were the movie audiences—and anyone who appreciates a piece of fine craftsmanship...
...Moreover, because a rise in the level of taste does not necessarily follow from a rise in class status (as he notes, even those who have "made it" often bring with them the cultural values of their previous station in life), Gans can accept the taste hierarchy at the same time that he attacks the class structure—especially since he regards cultural reform as much less important than social and economic reform...
...Greenberg argued that the art of Picasso, Joyce, Eliot, and others constituted an elite, advanced culture—made possible by a "superior consciousness of history"—whose very existence was threatened by the presence of mass, popular culture, which represented the dialectical opposite of the avant-garde in the historical movement of culture...
...Once (when he is told about the abortion), his lower lip quivers...
...He is playing the role as if he were on Chlorpromazine...
...GF-II was nominated for an Academy Award for Best ScreenThe Godfather-Part II play Adapted from Another Medium...
...It is important to realize just what kind of sociological sleight of hand is taking place in this move from "I do not believethat all taste cultures are of equal worth" to "they are of equal worth when considered in relation to their taste publics...
...Then don't see The Godfather-Part II...
...and modernism has long since ceased to be contemporary...
...You may come to 'a different conclusion than I, or interpret your findings differently, but I doubt it...
...Fortunately, cultural criticism, unlike Art Deco, has not yet become an object of the current wave of nostalgia for the thirties...
...It took years to bring this country around to believing that government could solve problems better than the market, and it will take years to get rid of that destructive notion...
...the fellow travellers of Stalin have long since been succeeded by those of Castro, and then Mao...
...But Gans' policy recommendations suggest an even more sophisticated kind of meddling: The business of "implementing subcultural programming" involves "(1) identifying all relevant taste publics and cultures and their aesthetic standards...
...They kept it up through the whole three and a half hours, and I think they really got something out of the time...
...Or, "different strokes for different folks...
...As it became increasingly clear that cultural and political radicalism were not natural allies, but ultimately natural enemies, other critics took the position opposite that of Greenberg and his Partisan Review colleagues: Instead of maintaining a commitment to modernist elite culture and (gradually) sacrificing political radicalism, they chose to sacrifice high culture...
...The Talkies by Benjamin Stein) Do you think you have a lot of willpower...
...People all over the theatre are nudging their neighbors and asking, "What's going on...
...The movie is the biggest fraud since Homestake Oil Drilling, and a hell of a lot more money and people are involved...
...Sometimes he even speaks Italian...
...and in favor of a policy of "subcultura...
...Gans' main criticism of the Nielsen system is that it isn't sophisticated enough...
...But popular culture also has some peculiar weaknesses—perhaps the greatest is its susceptibility to the kind of cynical or insensitive tampering which spoiled much of what was best in The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers...
...It has been 35 years since the first appearance of Greenberg's article...
...They are talking with a leading gamblinghood named Hyman Roth (obviously patterned after Meyer Lansky) about dividing up the gambling casinos in Cuba...
...subtlety...
...Just like our marriage is an abortion, an evil, unholy, dirty thing...
...I'm not saying that efforts at the other levels are not important—they are...
...What could the "Other Medium" have been...
...The classical statement of high-culture partisanship was made by Clement Greenberg in his famous essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch...
...So that you won't feel too bad about missing it, here is one of its more memorable moments: The Godfather, a vicious, brooding, sulking slimeball of a man, is told by his lovely Nordic wife ("Kay") that she had an abortion rather than have his child...
...You are...
...This tactical move of subordinating the cultural to the political has been the characteristic response of twentieth century socialism to the problems posed by modernism in the arts...
...Now, a partisan of high culture who suggested than Gans might find in this movie an interesting comment upon the nature of mass culture and its attendant undifferentiated consciousness might be guilty of the same kind of patronizing overintellectualization which is characteristic of Gans' own reviews (see his review of Chinatown in the November issue of Social I Policy...
...In this case, by ensuring that the movie pod-people would lose, the real-life pod-people—the studio executives—won...
...But what popular culture needs is less fellow-travelling, and more critical understanding...
...Popular culture has some peculiar strengths—not the least of them is the very resiliency which always has seemed to obviate the need for an intellectual defense: for the most part, the millions of fans who went to see Airport or The Exorcist did not care what the critics thought of their choices...
...It is a mistake, as Gans rightly notes, for partisans of high culture to regard popular culture as monolithic in character...
...At a time when auteur critics have rediscovered Howard Hawks, an editor of Partisan Review has resurrected the early-works of Dashiell Hammett, and Anna Moffo is packaged as a "superstar...
...Then, once alarmed, only short-run measures seem appropriate...
...It was an abortion," she says...
...Perhaps the most significant of the changes in intellectual fashion has been Popular Culture and High Culture by Herbert Gans Basic Books $10 in the attitude taken by cultural critics toward popular culture...
...In 35 years, the New Criticism has long since succumbed to other modes—the New Journalism and the New Sensibility, among others...
...Wage and price controls are known to be unworkable...
...Another clever, subtle moment: the GF is sitting on the sundeck of a pre-Castro Havana hotel (acutely uncomfortable in the sun) with a number of other hoods...
...By insisting that the final evaluation of the worth of a given taste culture must take into consideration its appropriate taste public, Gans is blandly denying that art—elite or otherwise—has any value on its own terms...
...What is new is his approach: In effect, he solves the problem with an analysis that obscures the crucial issues...
...Or, "you pays your money, you takes your choice...
...and Green-berg's essay makes little sense unless considered in this context...
...My advice to the business community can be summarized as follows: If you are interested in an ultimate victory you would be well advised to make an all-out effort to determine what influences and directs the course of events...
...The producers, however, insisted upon adding a framing sequence with an ending which showed the hero finally convincing The Authorities of the danger—in one of those artificial coincidences which movie-makers too often substitute for authentic suspense, his story is confirmed by an automobile collision involving a truck which is transporting more pods from the town for distribution throughout the state...
...Just then, because it is Roth's birthday, a waiter comes out with a big birthday cake with a map of Cuba on it...
...But instead of being sensitive to the nature of each of the different taste cultures, Gans has compounded that mistake by calmly regarding all of them as monolithic...
...Then, when people start getting strangled and cut up, we don't know how come...
...For about the first two hours of the film, Coppola has the GF mumble whenever he is talking to his henchmen, so that we can't hear what he is saying to them...
...Al Pacino, who plays GF, spends most of the movie staring at the ground with a burning Camel cigarette in his hand...
...By regarding all taste cultures in terms of their lowest common denominator—that they can be "used" to satisfy the needs and desires of their respective taste publics—Gans has built his answer into his analysis...
...but he never questions his unstated premise that culture is—or ought to be—"user"-determined, as if cultural needs were nothing more than a kind of collective itch, to be "stroked" through the proper marketing techniques...
...Such a philosophy of "fairness and justice" overrides objections to inadequate programs...
...There are about two hours of darkness in the film so the message gets across...
...I am saying that without the necessary effort at the intellectual level, nothing else will succeed...
...But the question of the autonomy of art is precisely what is at issue...
...As Hayek said, "Unless we can make the philosophical foundation of a free society once more a living issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark...
...In case all this subtlety gets to be too much and the audience gets confused or loses interest, Coppola has a brilliant way of keeping our curiosity alive...
...Unfortunately, the socialists do not fail to recognize and emphasize what the capitalists do not...
...So for rational reasons and with proof of bad experience we may want to get rid of a specific program but for the "good of society" or some other fundamentally egalitarian concept we must go along...
...He argues against a policy of "cultural mobility" (i.e., against encouraging tastes to rise along with class advance...
...I refer to John Kenneth Galbraith's new book, Assault on Free Enterprise (New York Times Book Review, September 15, 1974...
...This is an intellectual war that takes years to fight...
...He doesn't like the light, see, and all that darkness is supposed to show how he operates sort of out of the power of darkness and fear...
...everyone curious about whether any of those mumbles has anything to do with the killings...
...The irony of writing such a book when the cultural situation of the seventies would seem to demand just the opposite sort of "defense" seems not to have eluded Gans entirely—but he argues that, regardless of the current state of culture, the rise of egalitarianism and the decline in the status of intellectuals might prompt a revival of the kind of critique of popular culture that was common in the fifties...
...My idea is that we have tended to accept other notions which cause us to betray ourselves...
...Moreover, by analyzing taste publics as "users" of their respective taste cultures, Gans has succeeded in bringing about by definition precisely the kind of "leveling" that high culture critics have always feared that popular culture would bring about by itself, without benefit of an intellectual defense...
...There exist hundreds of other such specific interferences in the market that are known to be detrimental...
...ment through socioeconomic mobility...
...In other words, I do not believe that all taste cultures are of equal worth, but that they are of equal worth when considered in relation to their taste publics...
...Now Gans purports to be a "socialist, egalitarian sociologist," but there is something curious about the cultural pluralism which he professes to advocate...
...Only one man manages to resist, and ultimately to escape, what he recognizes as the horror of their "bodysnatching": the replacement of people by a society of beings, devoid of emotions, who live without individuality, competition, or strife in efficient, egalitarian, and rational harmony...
...Are you willing to be considered a freak even...
...26 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 197', programming" (i.e., encouraging the fashioners of culture to cater fully to the existing tastes of each public in the "taste hierarchy...
...So the pod-people are alive and well, in this latest reincarnation of the Cultural Commissars...
...Why then can't we keep them from beingimplemented or get rid of them once they have been implemented...
...Without capturing the intellectual community, efforts such as the one made by M. A. Wright, chairman of Exxon, will be turned against us...
...Now here's a part for those of you who like...
...Belief that government participation is necessary or helpful and that governments are always beneficial must be challenged...
...It also seems to me to be an inconsistency...
...When he is threatening someone he says, "If you do not do this, I will be very...disappointed," Pacino was nominated for Best Actor...
...At almost all times when the GF appears, he is in a darkened room...
...Businessmen realize the principles of leverage and long-term investment in business, but not in ideas...
...Although his argument for the imminence of such a revival is unpersuasive, Gans does raise the central cultural question of modernity: the problem of the compatibility of liberal democracy and elite culture...
...It would be a foolish defender of high culture who chose to criticize Gans on his grounds, since the deck is so obviously stacked in Gans' favor...
...Book Review/Robert Asahina Invasion of the Body Snatchers • • The emergence of modernism in the arts stimulated new controversies among cultural critics, and the distinction between "highbrows" and "lowbrows" was transformed from merely a descriptive categorization into the weaponry of cultural polemics...
...It had been long suspected that popular and high culture were more continuous than diametrically opposed, but the high-minded contempt of popular culture found in Greenberg's essay now seems to have been replaced by its opposite: a peculiar low-minded indulgence masquerading in academic garb as high-minded seriousness...
...And intellectual fashions are no less free from faddism than are hemlines...
...The Godfather-Part II cuts back and forth between the story of the new God28 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975...
...2) determining the publics which are currently poorly served with cultural content meeting their standards...
...So, advocates of the free market tend only to fight grass fires that are constantly around us...
...But his analysis gives little credit to either high or popular culture...
...Gans has been driven to this odd position largely, I suspect, out of frustration that both the taste hierarchy and the class structure have proved so stubbornly resistant to attempts at reform from above...
...Are you willing to be considered a nonconformist...
...19010 Sponsored by: The National Federation of Independent Business In cooperation with Intercollegiate Studies Institute The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 27 standing in the middle of the highway leading from the town, trying in vain to warn the passing motorists, who naturally take him to be insane...
...I wasn't as lucky...
...And although he concedes that "in real life, culture is not, cannot, and should not be created by such systematic planning procedures," and even goes so far as to admit that "novelty and surprise are essential qualities of all art and entertainment, both for creators and audiences, and research cannot provide them," there is little reason to believe that Gans thought that he was wasting his time in utopian fantasy by writing a book which asserts both the possibility and the desirability of such "programming...
...The best example that comes to mind is the almost total acceptance of egalitarian philosophy...
...So Gans' strategy is not new...
...But an interpretation of the movie is less interesting than a story about the movie...
...Although he concedes that the higher taste cultures are "better or at least more comprehensive" than the lower ones, he also argues "that the evaluation of any taste culture must also take its taste public into account, that the evaluation of any item of cultural content must be related to the aesthetic standards and background characteristics of the relevent public, and that to the extent that all taste cultures reflect the characteristics and standards of their public, they are equal in value...
...And thus Gans seems to be acceding to something in the cultural sphere that he would not tolerate in the political sphere—a stratification of society along class lines, without even the means to rise from one level to the next...
...You would do better to contemplate murder for three and a half hours than to see GF-II...
...Gruel...
...Bryn Mawr Avenue Bryn Mawr, Pa...
...It might be better to consider as a parable an example chosen from the very popular culture which Gans purports to defend: the 1956 horror movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which creatures from outer space grow out of vegetable-like pods, and take over the bodies and assume the identities of the inhabitants of a small California town...
...Although Gans does not specify who will do the "programming"—a term which he admits that he appropriated from the mass media industry—it seems evident that it will be the members of his academic field...
...Now I suggest that we strive to undermine such false underlying concepts which make victories over specific policy programs temporary or of little significance...
...Herbert Gans, professor of sociology at Columbia and sometime film critic for Social Policy, has written a lengthy and detailed "analysis and evaluation of taste," which, in the name of cultural pluralism, defends popular culture against its high culture critics...
...Fashions do change, of course—and with a rapidity that is often the surest clue to their significance and depth...
...When I finally went to see GF-II, as its fans call it, two teenage girls in front of me were mixing screwdrivers while the show went on...
...The reduction of value to taste in aesthetics is analogous to the reduction of merit to praise in ethics...
...It was this very threat of the Cultural Commissars to the autonomy of art that dispelled, for some cultural critics in the thirties, the seemingly natural faith in the compatibility of artistic and political vanguardism: One result was the separation of Partisan Review from the sponsorship of the Communist John Reed Club...
...But why should he believe that sociologists, armed with the latest in computer hardware and methodology, will come up with anything different from what we already have, courtesy of the Nielsen people—a spinoff of "All in the Family" for every combination and permutation ofethnic, political, and sexual categories...
...Let me try to illustrate this point...
...Roth slices up the cake, thus slicing up the map of Cuba, and gives pieces of it to the racketeers...
...The director of the film, Don Siegel, intended to finish it with a sequence showing the hero, who has managed to escape, The 1975 Ludwig von Mises Memorial Essay Contest THE GROWTH OF BUREAUCRACY: ISSUES AND ALTERNATIVES $2,000 in Prizes Open to High School & College Students Entry Deadline: July 31 PANEL OF JUDGES Martin Anderson Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution Stanford University Cohn Campbell Professor of Economics Dartmouth College George W. Carey Editor The Political Science Reviewer Israel Kirzner Professor of Economics New York University Edwin McDowell Editorial Page Staff The Wall Street Journal William H. Peterson Professor of American Business The American Graduate School of International Management Gordon Tullock University Professor Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University For Contest Entry Forms Write: ESSAY CONTEST Intercollegiate Studies Institute 14 So...
...Unfortunately, the lessons of the problematic encounter with modernism in the arts seem to have been as quickly forgotten as those learned from the equally troublesome encounter with Marxism...
...He has managed the trick of retaining democratic choice—including the choice of high culture—while dismissing the threat of elite culture...
...But there is no end to the increasing number of new fires that spring up daily...
Vol. 8 • June 1975 • No. 9
