POPULAR CULTURE AND HIGH CULTURE CRITICS
Gans, Herbert J.
Not so long ago, upper class essayists were functioning as social analysts of the society they lived in by analyzing their favorite belles lettres—usually written by equally upper class authors....
...Rosenberg calls kitsch and art are reduced...
...The first seems to be advocated by Mr...
...2) to find some ways of raising all members of society to the socio-economic and cultural level at which they have the opportunity for greater choice among all the arts...
...Rosenberg's, which seems to me to strike at the desire to understand per se...
...I find that trying to understand the motivations by which millions of Americans make choices among the varieties of popular arts is a rewarding kind of study...
...Perhaps these attacks reflect, at least in part, some fear by literary essayists that the more objective—if yet imperfect —methods of sociology will render their skills and prerogatives for analyzing the social process obsolete...
...But in some cases, the fear is that of Ortega y Gasset's mass man all over again—as MT...
...Rosenberg feels that such people and their choices are irrelevant...
...Such criticisms by humanists are badly needed...
...Admittedly, Mr...
...If they do have insight, then the motivations of the social scientists—or the literary critics functioning as quasi-social scientists— seem less important...
...ROSENBERG'S ARGUMENT is also another in a series of recent attacks on the desirability of social science research on the part of humanists and critics in the liberal and radical camps—critics from whom one would have expected support of such study...
...Whether understanding a popular work is more or less rewarding to the analyst than the masterpiece wrapped in silence depends also on the mind of the analyst, not only on the thing being analyzed...
...Accepting the significance of popular culture may mean that in terms of social and psychological function, the distinctions between what Mr...
...If millions of people choose these works and reject others out of the variety of popular culture productions available, then their choices must have significance in the sense that they reveal something about themselves and society—even if Mr...
...It is especially sad to see this among those who call themselves socialist writers...
...In the face of a growing and not infrequently imperialistic social science, this is not hard to understand...
...The mere act of studying popular culture does not give it an intellectual dimension any more than biochemical research adds an intellectual dimension to disease...
...Is MR...
...Rosenberg shows to be true of many of the pieces in Mass Culture...
...Rosenberg suggests, the popular arts he calls kitsch cannot be wished out of existence...
...Moreover, since the non-radical social functions of the arts cannot be ignored as simply as Mr...
...Rosenberg's criticism...
...The development of such criteria can proceed only if we take a closer look at what the popular arts mean to the audience who accept or reject them daily...
...but this only proves that we are all human beings...
...According to Mr...
...Rosenberg...
...Recently we have conceived the idea that in order to understand society one had to analyze the patterns of behavior engaged in by most people, and the popular art forms that they chose and rejected...
...His definition of art faces the difficulty that even the most radical art must eventually exist within a social framework larger than the creative coterie in order to achieve its radical function...
...and (3) to develop some criteria to distinguish between better and worse art (the latter to be called kitsch...
...His definitions of art and kitsch are such that as soon as art finds an audience of non-artists, and develops any kind of non-revolutionary function, it becomes kitsch...
...Rosenberg's criterion that the only legitimate reason for studying popular art is to do away with it, or to change the landscape, then it may be that even more research is necessary...
...The second appears to me to be an admirable aim, in the long run much more productive than bewailing the state of the mass media and its students—and incidentally a solution much more in the socialist tradition...
...If the existing studies are without merit, that is a legitimate ground for Mr...
...Rosenberg is concerned mainly with the survival and growth of art which is radical in function, an objective with which I would not quarrel...
...ROSENBERG'S angry denial of significance in popular culture (he mentions Li'l Abner and Mickey Spillane as examples) which strikes me as most important...
...in short, that in social analysis as in politics, one had to consider the decisions of the many, and not only of the wise few...
...Nor does the act of research endow popular culture with intellectual justification...
...With the help of more research on popular culture products, as these are responded to by their audiences, the critical judgment of audiences and professional critics might be synthesized by the latter for the development of these criteria...
...187...
...If attempting to see the meanings that this work has for members of the audience in relation to their own lives is "clever interpretation," it seems to me that we need more of it...
...I refer rather to criticism like Mr...
...that both have significence does not mean they have the same kinds or degrees of significance, or even similar functions, much less meanings or "messages...
...Rosenberg, "they (the social scientists) have put into practice the notion that a bad work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure method is more rewarding to the mind than a masterpiece wrapped in silence...
...Is it not possible also that research about the popular phenomena of the day could be as useful to a change in the social landscape as the art which Mr...
...The Reuel Denney-Mary Lea Meyersohn "Bibliography of 200 Studies of Leisure" in the American Journal of Sociology, May 1957 shows only too well how little has been done...
...Harold Rosenberg's determined and stimulating argument for an end to the study of popular culture in the Winter 1958 DISSENT suggests the hair-raising possibility that the pendulum is beginning to swing back...
...This dilemma can be solved in at least three ways: (1) to ignore the 186 majority of society's members...
...Both kinds seem to me to be necessary and desirable for developing more sophisticated value and policy perspectives for the future of popular and high culture in our society...
...185 Mr...
...Rosenberg exaggerates the amount of study being devoted to popular culture in the serious literary magazines or among social researchers...
...It is not the quality of the work that social scientists study, but the ability of the work to attract the choices of the audience, and the reasons for it...
...The third seems to me to be an important short and long run objective...
...However, this forces him into an extreme perspective in which all other art forms appear to be homogeneous, and universally undesirable, i.e., kitsch...
...If one accepts Mr...
...Likes or dislikes of the subject of study can sometimes stimulate perspectives that result in new and useful insights...
...I refer here not to the charges that social science is selling out to the manipulative purposes of Madison Avenue, nor to the debunking of the often narrow and sometimes spurious objectivity of social science method...
...Rosenberg advocates...
...Social function is only one criterion by which the two may be compared or distinguished...
...Others may feel equally about the masterpiece wrapped in silence...
...Marx and Freud seem to have found this so...
...If the understanding of society is still a valid aim for intellectuals, the mass media seem to me as important a phenomenon for social research as any other...
Vol. 5 • April 1958 • No. 2
