Popular Art And Folk Art

...and it is no less true that the poor quality of these products is due to an historical coincidence— of democratization of culture with competitive capitalism...

...1 Georg Simmel: Philosophische Kultur...

...The peasant does not feel bored, he goes to sleep—which of course is not necessarily more admirable...

...That people read the amount they do is by no means a clear gain...

...With them, the identification of the reader with the hero takes a form calculated to eliminate all distinction between poetry and reality, author and public, the personage of fiction and the sympathetic follower of the story...

...No doubt, the entertainment industry does little or nothing to educate the man in the street in independent thinking, to improve his taste or strengthen the sense of his own personality, but even if it wanted to do so, this would not be easy...

...Popular art and folk art, in spite of their apparent kinship, have scarcely any points of contact...

...4 G. Seldes: The Big Audience...

...The answer is not so simple as it appears to the believer in progress...

...Tension between the spiritual elite and the rest of society is not a phenomenon of today or yesterday...

...The products of mass culture not only ruin people's taste, make them unwilling to think for themselves, educate them in conformity...

...The reader sees and judges the characters by reference to his own aims, hopes, and interests...

...the essential thing is that certain subjects are not to be treated or even touched upon...

...the middle class also took time to improve its taste...

...That is not to say that they take no part in the ideological struggle...

...Selfdeceiving romanticism is at the bottom both of the mass-public's optimism and of its pessimism, so that sorrow for all the good things they have irrevocably missed or wasted is as powerful a source of tears shed in the cinema as is the weak hope that perhaps they have not missed everything after all...

...There is no generation so content to wallow in emotional stories and melodramatic situations as one that has been frustrated in the expression of its normal emotional life...

...It was obvious to him from the start that the hero of an epic, a romance, or a tragedy moved in a different circle from his own...

...The popular art of the half-educated masses, however, has never possessed any independent value at all...

...Indeed, nothing is less attractive than folk art to the modern half-educated crowd that apes the ways of life and modes of culture of the upper class...

...We should therefore transfer this species of amusement from the genus reading, to that comprehensive class characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet co-existing propensities of human nature, namely, indulgence of sloth, and hatred of vacancy .6 Boredom is a product of our restless, sensation-hungry, urban way of life...

...The illegitimate relationship that they develop towards their heroes is one of self-dramatization and self-pity quite as much as selfdeception...

...Everything comprised today under the headings of "light music," "light reading," "decoration for the home" was before then practically non-existent...

...I In practice, no doubt, both methods are employed, as best suits the situation...

...Good taste is not the root but the fruit of aesthetic culture...

...The writers of former ages, and especially those of the otherwise sober eighteenth century, by no means despised heart-stirring effects, but they invariably appealed to the reader's reason as well as to his heart, recalling him, often somewhat rudely, from wish-dreams and utopian fantasies to a sense of reality...

...Today's mass-produced art has, like all art, an ideological origin and aim, which, thanks to the refinement of modern propaganda methods, it no doubt subserves more successfully than was ever possible before...

...alities...

...In a word, the new, queer feature about the modern artist's relation to his profession is his unnatural, inhibited attitude towards everything material and practical, not the fact that he plies his art as a trade...

...1950...

...Art has always wanted to please, usually to entertain as well...

...What marks the commercialization of art in the age of mass culture is not just the effort to produce salable, if possible the most profitable, works of art—apart from the romantics and their circle that was common enough in former times—but rather the notion of finding a formula by which the same type of thing may be sold to the same type of public on the biggest possible scale...

...Obviously the abrupt democratization of culture, the breath-taking speed of technical change, and the ruthless sway of the profit-principle in the field of art have produced phenomena of a novel type...

...The demand for art of the urban masses is just hunger for more raw material, a hunger that must be satisfied in order to prevent from running idle a machine that cannot be stopped...

...They must read a novel, see a film, hear dance-music, have the wireless singing, crooning or at least humming, because they don't know what else to do with themselves...

...THE STRUCTURE OF MODERN INDUSTRIAL Society, the mechanical regularity of city life, the inevitable, if largely unintentional and unconscious, adaptation of the individual to the common forms of behaviour disposes men to be mass-minded...

...the former is in danger of developing a private language and becoming unintelligible, the latter of becoming in the end unable to speak anything but the impersonal, colourless language of the masses...

...but it would not have occurred to any of them to turn out works designed to make people blindly contented...

...Few readers or cinema-goers really hope for a "happy ending" in Hollywood style, though they play with such ideas as a part of their enjoyment...

...The romantic poet makes the reader his confidant, so that anybody can feel himself to be a part in a way, and sets up between reader and hero a degree of intimacy which allows anybody not only to participate in the hero's fate, but actually to imagine himself in the privileged position of a fictitious character...

...5. 1954, pp...

...He stares out at an expressionless mask and tries to imagine behind it a more sympathetic audience somewhere in the far future...

...Does the public really get what it wants, or is it conditioned to want what is set before it...

...Art for general consumption is always on a lower level than art produced for the educated...

...But however small the change in this respect, however unimportant quantity always is as compared with quality in matters of art and culture, the consequences of the fact that ever greater masses of people are coming into the market as consumers of art are quite incalculable...

...Certainly, modern mass production plays upon people's wants in a manner that often runs counter to the natural development of their taste...

...It is therefore but an empty argument to disclaim responsibility for the present state of popular art with the phrase that the public gets what it wants...

...they are always talking about the bad example the conduct of film heroes sets the ordinary man...

...1944, p. 23...

...With the emergence in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the modern public, reading, from being a somewhat rare pleasure, became a passion...

...The avoidance of these themes obviously signifies a tacit acceptance of existing conditions, but the positive propaganda, generally speaking, amounts to no more than a somewhat hesitant assurance that this world is the best of all possible worlds...

...Mozart composed the most charming music...

...Public taste is not a primary datum...

...a certain opposition to higher artistic culture has at all times characterized popular art...

...He realized that his true value was not enhanced by keeping up a semblance of independence...

...As Georg Simmel describes it: "Articles are not first produced, then become fashionable...

...The moral harm done by the cinema is a favorite topic of the cultural critics of our day...

...D. W. Brogan: "The Problem of High Culture...

...The notion one often encounters that the art of the modern masses is in the main a continuation of the former folk art has no better foundation than the attribute of "popularity" which they both share—though the sense of this word is different in the two cases...

...It has been well said that to feel pleased means "being in accord with the prevailing circumstances.5 Cervantes, Voltaire, and Swift wrote " extremely amusing books, Rubens and Watteau painted pictures that are a sheer treat to the eyes...

...He does not merely put himself in their place, he also sees them in situations that are quite inappropriate to them and have meaning only for him...

...Usually they do not expect overmuch of life, but they measure their own successes and failures, their own resources and possibilities, by a standard that is fundamentally unreal and unsatisfactory...

...6 Coleridge: Biographia Literaria, XXII...

...The captains of the entertainment industry naturally only want to earn money, choosing for that end bad art rather than good, in the first place because they generally have no notion of the difference, and secondly because bad art is easier to produce and to sell...

...They are not even, as businessmen go, especially enterprising...

...This ostensible lack of regard for the public is no doubt usually a cloak to cover the artists' desperate competition for public favour, but the ideal of an art that is disinterested, makes no concessions, is inevitably misunderstood by the present generation and appreciated only by future generations, is nonetheless a genuine ideal and basic for the world-view of the romantic...

...There are indeed ways and means of raising the level of popular art, and progress in that direction would certainly require sweeping economic and social changes, but not necessarily the disappearance of either capitalism or democracy...

...Present-day art moves between these two dangers...

...Folk art and popular art are, logically speaking, at most coordinate species, deriving from a common origin, but certainly not from one another...

...But oddly enough, he is also accused of artificially inducing a demand for new types, that is, for a change of fashion, so as to increase consumption...

...Certainly the heroes of great poetry at all times were in a sense ideal figures, the expression of people's wishes, models to which they looked up, often not without envy...

...The question then arises as to whether the phenomenon of the mass, that is, spiritual monotony and lack of independence on the part of the public, is the effect of the artificial standardization of modern are production...

...3 Talented persons do not march through open gates of culture of their own accord...

...2 Dwight Macdonald: "A Theory of 'Popular Culture...

...The art that satisfies this hunger is no more than an indifferent fuel, a miserable stop-gap...

...These are primarily: healthy sex relations, class war and the workers' movement, any criticism directed against the existing order of society or the authorities, anything involving religious doubts or opposition to the Church...

...but all that has little to do with the enjoyment of art...

...She is the classical example of the romantic born too late who claims extraterritoriality in life without having earned it in any way, missing modest happiness through constantly expecting happiness on the grand scale—expecting a first prize that he never draws...

...The alienation of the idealist from the present entails no less of a risk than the materialist's readiness to compromise...

...and this disposition is being continuously intensified by means of press, radio, cinema, advertise ments, posters, in fact everything that the eye sees and the ear hears...

...The mistake is to suppose that the masses thought or felt differently in the days when there were not quite so many of them...

...However, feeling happy is a relatively harmless way of ignoring or falsifying reality...

...Often they are confirmed in their prejudices, but still a way is opened for criticism and opposition...

...It forms part of a chapter called "Educational Strata in the History of Art: Folk Art and Popular Art...

...MARCEAU PIVERT As we go to press, we learn with sorrow of the death of Marceau Pivert on the night of June 2. Marceau Pivert had been ill for many years, but had never ceased his political activity in behalf of French socialism and the left-wing of the SFIO, of which he and his group of friends formed a significant part...

...The commercial practices of the entertainment industry certainly constitute one of the most ominous aspects of the present cultural crisis...

...By contrast, the modern best-seller depicts emotion not as something normal and inevitable, not as a natural and in its way valuable element of human life, balanced by reason and a sense of decency and self-respect, but as something quite exceptional, the outcome of a sort of perpetual crisis, always with a tinge of the solemn, the extravagant, and the morbid...

...THE GREAT ATTRACTION of the successful film and novel of today lies in the escape from reality it offers, through identification of the reader or spectator with the hero...

...Before that time there were, as there have always been, more and less successful, more and less ambitious, more and less complex forms of art...

...1911, p. 34...

...The feeling that something is wanting may be genuine, but people have no idea what really is wanting...

...the only function in the evolution of art which it might be said to have fulfilled has been that of providing a counterweight to certain extremely esoteric tendencies...

...Of course, such identification and vicarious participation in the hero's fate, his struggles and successes, has at all times played an important role in the enjoyment of art...

...good taste, the power of discriminating good from bad in art and consciously choosing the good, is not something that can be left to the spontaneous feelings, the "uncorrupted" healthy instincts of people, masses, proletariat, or what you will...

...They scarcely seem to consider that no bad example is so harmful as the life-fantasy that the hero's romantic fate implants and instils in spectators, who feel that it relieves them of responsibility for the tasks of their own unromantic lives...

...Politics...

...they also open the eyes of the majority for the first time to fields of life which they never came in contact with before...

...they poked fun at the absurdities and the awkward situations one finds in the world, but they never thought of pretending such things did not exist...

...Excessive pessimism about the present is usually just the reverse side of an excessively favorable estimation of the past...

...They address themselves to all and sundry, want to satisfy everybody, not to hurt anybody's feelings...

...The facts to be noted, the issues to be decided, the solutions to be accepted are all served up to the people in a form to be swallowed whole...

...Sentimentality fulfills essentially a surrogate function of this sort in the life of society...

...in the popular literature of today they have vanished so utterly that the modern reader sees the heroes of his favorite novels as no more and no less than the fulfillment of his own frustrated or muddled life, the realization of all he has missed...

...The artist accepted it, in one form or other, without any false shame, and scarcely ever had any feeling that he was giving way when he complied with his patron's wishes...

...That pattern is of course a circle, but one that can be broken...

...The ideological principles that they follow are thus rather of a negative than of a positive kind...

...in such a situation, in which neither of the extremes can be accepted with equanimity, no artist, be he ever so uncompromising, should ignore the requirements of popular art...

...They were acquainted with and respected the secrets of the heart, they did not make a mystery of them...

...The hope that the opening of the gates of culture to the people would produce a flood of new talent has not been fulfilled, and is hardly likely to be fulfilled, at least in the way it was formerly conceived...

...THE EDITORS...

...3 ff...

...sometimes it creates a new demand, sometimes it artificially keeps an old demand in being...

...Whenever the circle of consumers of art has been widened, the immediate result has been to debase the level of artistic production...

...Feelings banned from real life, and which in everyday reality wither or degenerate, find a refuge and fulfillment in the sentimental backstairs novel and the operetta...

...Folk art is naive, crude, clumsy and old-fashioned, popular art often skillful and technically apt, though vulgar, subject to superficial and rapid transformation but incapable of achieving either more radical change or finer discrimination...

...3 Cf...

...but the reader would never have thought of measuring himself by their standards or of claiming to behave as they did...

...Such imaginings are vain, unfruitful, and dangerous...

...We know that ideologies function apart from all intention or consciousness, and that they can be active without there being any conspiracy or definite plan or campaign...

...whereas today the art of the urban masses is impossible to confuse with folk art, being utterly incompatible with it...

...The business man is often accused of sticking to the same model as long as possible because, as is well known, it is precisely the salability of the same product over a long period which makes a business really profitable...

...It is by no means just the public that decides what it would like...

...In former periods the gap that separated the country-folk from the lower strata in the towns was not so great as it is today, so that it is not always clear whether some particular work is a product of the half-educated middle class or the uneducated countryfolk...

...We salute the memory of a life-long militant and socialist...

...11 The history of modern popular art begins about the middle of the nineteenth century with the rise of the idea that art is relaxation, the prevalence of a desire to find in art a means of distraction rather than of concentration, entertainment rather than education or deepened understanding...

...but now there emerges for the first time the notion of an art which does not present any difficulties or problems, but is immediately intelligible...

...But the publishers of best sellers and the film manufacturers of Hollywood are by no means among the most loyal exponents of their class ideology...

...articles are produced to create a fashion...

...For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, [he writes] I dare not compliment their passtime, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading...

...Since the romantics, the artist has the feeling of being faced, not by a friendly patron or a circle of well-known, well-disposed individuals interested in art, but by an indefinite, indifferent and often hostile public...

...they might more reasonably be accused of lack ing conviction than of being unbending fanatics...

...they must keep their customers...

...Genuine art is used up, disin• tegrated, and simplified by folk art...

...Yet to maintain that the producers are engaged in a devilish conspiracy against all that is spiritual is a silly example of vulgarized Marxism...

...it is what it has become...

...Of course, entertaining books were written—often a good deal more entertaining than the books of today —tuneful, rhythmical, easily memorized music was composed, "pretty," agreeable pictures were painted...

...it is rather the present alienation and detachment of higher art, which, since the romantics, has claimed to exist for the artist alone, and takes or pretends to take no account of the public...

...The conclusion, however, which some have thought fit to draw from this critical situation, that "we must remove either exploitation or democracy if culture is to recover its health," 2 is not convincing...

...it was only the romantic's bad conscience that attached such extraordinary value to that semblance...

...Those who lament modern art-production, supposing that there has never been anything comparable with the mechanization and commercialization of our popular art, with its dependence upon the ideology of the ruling class and its evident inferiority to the art of the educated, see the past in too rosy a light...

...The people who weep most at the fate of the unfortunate hero of romance or film are precisely those who seldom feel any compassion in real life...

...or whether the masses themselves are to be blamed for the low quality of the art served up to them...

...It is certainly easier to manipulate puppets than personalities, but in any case the masses do not consist of person...

...The danger of the insatiable hunger for romance, which today is mainly fed by cinema and radio, first made itself felt at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and was recognized in its full extent by Coleridge...

...the assertion, however, that there has been nothing in the past at all analogous to our present mass culture rests upon a superficial view of things...

...Diogenes...

...while the rise of the middle classes about the middle of the nineteenth century affords another example...

...Madame Bovary is the prototype of the novel-reader who by means of this kind of life-fantasy concludes a comforting, if ultimately untenable, pact with life...

...its likes are in part determined by what is offered it...

...They amused themselves and others by depicting the strange twists and turns of life without any idea of escaping from reality...

...The most instructive example is that of the dissolution of the courtly-aristocratic culture and the rise of a bourgeois culture at the end of the rococo...

...WHICH IS THE LESSER EVIL, to read too much or too little...

...every work of art had its price, though this was not necessarily paid down in hard cash...

...But he is at least innocent of that unhealthy dread of doing nothing, that vague urge to do some thing or other which Coleridge refers to and which is unknown outside the atmosphere of the modern big town...

...If the art products that they formerly accepted were of somewhat better quality than at present, that was only because such products were not in the first instance made for them...

...but really it is not so much the commercialization of artproduction which is so novel and important for contemporary interpretation...

...There has always been more than one level of artistic culture, and the wider the social basis of a particular type of art, the greater has always been a risk of its becoming degenerate or altogether dependent upon extraneous interests...

...It would be a utopian dream to expect that this tension should suddenly cease and give birth to a communal art that would interest and satisfy everybody...

...W. Adorno: Dialektih der Aufklkrung, 1947, p. 172...

...sentimentality is very much worse...

...but their agreeableness was only a byproduct, a means to an end, not an end in itself...

...But serious as the situation may be, it is no worse than that in which popular art found itself in former times...

...Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility...

...but the people to be pleased and the level on which they are to be entertained have varied from time to time...

...To break it would, however, cost time and money, and as is well known, publishers and film producers are not philanthropists...

...In general they have no choice and are quite content to have none...

...Sentimentality is sentiment repressed...

...The serious side of life, a feeling for the precariousness of human existence was never quite absent from their major work...

...Before the day of romanticism, every art-product was recognized as being a commodity to a greater or lesser extent...

...Yet never before was there such a blind wallowing in wish-fantasies of that kind as there is today...

...We wish to thank both the publisher and Professor Hauser, the author of The Social History of Art, for permission to print this selection, which continues the discussion of mass culture that has been appearing in the pages of DISSENT during the past few years.—THE EDITORS...

...Though the present situation may not be very encouraging, it is, to judge from history, not a hopeless one...

...what the educated value and enjoy in folk art escapes the half-educated altogether...

...Today, in consequence of the emergence of the lower middle class and certain sections of the industrial workers as purchasers of art, a phenomenon well known in past history is recurring...

...It is fitting that the very last article he wrote for his publication, Correspondance Socialiste, should have been both an attack on the coming to power of de Gaulle and an expression of faith in the ability of the French people to resist fascism...

...The article that appears below is taken from a forthcoming book entitled The Philosophy of Art History, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf in the fall of 1958...

...But since the romantics, all the bounds that once enclosed that ideal, remote, and forbidden life have been broken down...

...The first beginnings of this unrestrained self-deception through art go back to the romantics...

...The mere abolition of barriers between classes and of external hindrances to the operation of natural selection would scarcely provide any automatic solution of this problem...

...5 M. Horkheimer, Th...

...Feelings for which there is no room in the life of society, being something one must not give way to, are exaggerated, over-valued, raised to the level of the ideal and the unreal, divorced from life and from all need to stand the test of time...

...mere assurances that education of the public is bound to pay in the long run4 would not be likely to induce them to risk upsetting a safe market...

...To charge publishers, film producers, and record manufacturers with carrying on a planned conspiracy to keep their public from growing up spiritually seems rather fantastic...

...Well, perhaps they get something out of it...

...it is watered down, botched and bowdlerized by popular art...

...Only in our own day has the enjoyment of art from being a passion become a mere habit, that is, the satisfaction of a want that one is only aware of when it is not being satisfied...

...THE ASSERTION OFTEN MADE that the products of mass culture are put out by the entertainment industry not to satisfy, but to exploit, people's cultural needs is no doubt essentially true...

...indeed art in general can be described as a satisfaction of man's desire for another self and a better life...

...However, only a very simple psychology would explain this identification entirely in terms of wish-fantasies and wish-fulfillment...

...Folk art has generally been a poor imitation, and whatever the addition of its own special values, it has seldom been in proportion to the loss of artistic quality suffered in the process...

...They never were any more capable of judging, never had a more independent or more reliable taste, never had any objection to having their spiritual nutriment predigested for them...