Culture Vultures

...in fact, "If anything, the caste structure of tastefulness that I adumbrated in my 1949 essay became strengthened...

...Once men and women started to huddle around their TV sets, that collective culture died, along with the class consciousness it promoted...

...Kämmen is somewhat inconsistent about the more important differences...

...Until the 1960s, or even the 1980s, American intellectuals were almost embarrassed by this global triumph...

...Lynes' contribution was to divide the middlebrows into two segments: upper (very dry martinis) and lower (bourbon...

...The author has only three big points to make, so he ends up making them again and again...

...Something subverted it and kept it down, and that something was probably television...

...Blazing a path followed by many later writers on taste levels, Lynes claimed that highbrows and lowbrows respected and sympathized with each other, while both despised the middlebrows...

...During the past couple of decades, though, the mood has changed...

...his work was descriptive rather than exhortatory...

...Popular and mass culture did create real problems for the political margins...

...Mass culture, in Kämmen's sense, came later, with the dominance of radio networks in the mid-1930s, technical improvements in motion pictures that become apparent about 1940, the emergence of TV later in the decade, and popular music from Elvis onward...

...Television producers sought an American vernacular as oblivious as possible to age, education, and ethnicity...

...They needed to satisfy audiences with programs that would appeal to children and adults, middlebrow and low...

...It is consumed, that is, mainly in homes rather than the public places of entertainment that predominated before the coming of the boob tube...

...American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (Knopf, 352 pp., $30) by Michael Kämmen ought to have been an essay on those debates, but unwisely ballooned into a book about them...

...Yet the country's international eminence in this sphere was only achieved in the present century, with the coming of motion pictures, jazz, Broadway show music, radio, television, and rock and roll...

...His most important idea, and the one repeated most frequently, is the distinction between popular culture and mass culture...

...they spread our influence throughout the darkest corners of the world and generate huge sums for our trade balance...

...Kämmen's second big point is that the boundaries among taste levels eroded as mass culture developed...

...Television, by contrast, always addressed a much larger, more diverse audience, for the networks, with their lust for high ratings (and thus advertising rates) dominated the medium until recently...

...Kämmen claims to have found "strong confirmation that brow levels had become much less significant" over time in a 1976 essay by Lynes looking back on his earlier writings...

...On the Left, too, there was a strong tendency to cultural conservatism...

...Michel de Certeau, a French critic mentioned respectfully by the author, argues that reading is an interactive rather than passive act because it somehow transforms the text...

...This scale was made possible by an "increasing dependence upon technologies of virtual access" (in other words the product's electronic transmission through film, recordings, radio, TV, and today the Internet, at very low cost as compared with plays, live music, and books...

...Of course, most of them hated popular culture, mass culture and everything that reminded them of either...

...Eliot on the Right, to Walter Lippmann and the preneoconservative Irving Kristol in the Center, to Dwight Macdonald on the Left...

...Arnold nonetheless summoned into existence an elite "to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world...

...Though in Europe professional critics began offering their views on taste to the public in the 18th century, no such group existed in the United States until the turn of the present century...

...Reading—surely one of the highest forms of recreation—usually takes place in the home, and it is not "participatory and interactive" in the sense of, let us say, vaudeville, where comics routinely bantered with their audiences...

...Many offered themselves in this role, ranging from T.S...

...The author's discussion starts with the publication (in the February 1949 issue of Harper's magazine) of Russell Lynes' celebrated article "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow," later expanded into his 1954 book The Tastemakers...

...American popular culture certainly has its great monuments, notably jazz, the Broadway musical theater, and many classic Hollywood films...

...These writers took their cue from the Matthew Arnold of Culture and Anarchy (1869), who probably never imagined anything remotely like popular culture—he was really condemning old-fashioned boorishness and religious narrowness...

...indeed, as Kämmen observes, critics of all political persuasions (or none) directed "their most strident scorn" in this direction...

...At the century's end, as people of different nationalities and races interact far more intensively than ever before, a fundamentally American cultural medium seems to be their means of communication...

...But the fact that a mass audience once existed for the music of Charlie Parker and Richard Rodgers— and for the plays, however performed, of Shakespeare—does seem to suggest that popular taste was not low originally...

...According to Kämmen, Lynes had it wrong: Precisely when he and others "were emphasizing ladders and scaffolds of taste, abundant evidence shows that the ladders were insecurely positioned and the scaffolds precarious...

...As has been noted by Stephen Whitfield, a longtime NL contributor invoked by Kämmen, the 195 6 marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller joined lowbrow and highbrow in the flesh...

...The question is a hard one, and Kämmen does not come to any conclusions...

...Along the way Kämmen also emphasizes, instead, that popular culture was (and, where it survives, still is) "participatory and interactive," while its mass-market counterpart tends to induce "passivity and the privatization of culture...

...But as Kämmen notes, without seeming to understand its effect on his argument, that claim can be applied to TV If TV is active, what could possibly be passive...

...County fairs, vaudeville and bluegrass music all rank among the former...

...From 1910 to 1940 or so, Kämmen argues, the leading critics—largely newspaper and magazine pundits—had considerable power, which the rise of mass culture was to destroy...

...Following Virginia Woolf, Lynes condemned middlebrows as "pests...

...On the Right, mass culture's inherent bias toward the widest possible distribution base made it a revolutionary force opposed to national distinctions: In the 1950s and '60s, for example, the apartheid government of South Africa banned TV on the ground that "Television, like Communism, promotes sameness...

...These were not new categories: Van Wy ck Brooks, in a 1915 essay, had decried them as "equally undesirable...

...Early radio stations, for instance, were locally owned and not hooked up to national networks, and programs on those stations were generally directed at listeners of a specific class, ethnic group, cultural level, and race...

...as Kämmen observes in a good footnote, the Communist critic Mike Gold attacked jazz as bourgeois and called for proletarian music in the manner of Beethoven...

...In 1976 Lynes actually wrote that although "The lines of my arbitrary categories have become even more indistinct than they were in 1949," the "basic pattern still has some validity...

...What the author describes as the "less important" differences between these two stages of culture "involve matters of scale—such as thousands of people at an amusement park as opposed to many tens of millions worldwide watching the Super Bowl in January, for example...

...The July issue of the Atlantic Monthly has an interesting article on this subject...

...Now that cable TV, computers and the Internet have largely fractured the audience, can popular culture rise again...

...Kämmen does cite many specific instances of converging taste levels, but it is easy to do that for any period: During most of the 19th century Shakespeare was the most popular playwright on the American stage, in productions marked by mawkish sentimentality and considerable audience participation...

...Unfortunately, too, it reads at times like a succession of index cards or, presumably, their present-day word processing equivalent...

...As Eric Hobsbawm showed in The Age of Extremes, union and political party meetings were important forms of entertainment for their members until the 1950s...

...This is a corollary of the first point, for the mass marketer's goal is to achieve as large an audience as possible...

...What Kämmen calls the privatization of leisure helped destroy the Left...

...In the long run, that kind of sameness is bound to be mass culture's chief result...

...Lynes himself was not such a person...

...Kämmen's third major point is that the cultural authorities who once tried to clarify and enforce brow-level distinctions have declined...

...This distinction between passive and active is nevermade convincingly...

...At some points, he emphasizes the contrast between the fragmented markets typical of popular culture and the more unified ones that followed...

...Kämmen is a professor of history at Cornell and a past president of the Organization of American Historians, but he generally writes here in the turgid language of social science...

...Attempts to explain this confront the usual chicken-and-egg problem: Does an already low cultural level force mass-media companies to debase their products, or does the low level of those very products subvert public taste...

...Throughout most of the long-running argument over popular and mass culture, the majority of participants attacked both wholeheartedly...

...In contrast, the overall quality of mass culture today is low, and it has been going downhill since it achieved its mature form in the '60s...

...It is quite otherwise in popular and mass culture...

...Advertisers, with their craving for a huge, homogeneous audience, must share the blame with the networks...