"I guess you had to be there" (Chapter 5)

I am now getting so far behind with blogging about Kenneth Myers's All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes that I’m a whole chapter behind Cindy’s schedule.  And my unusually busy winter, combined with my slower than average writing, will probably keep me behind schedule for some time.  I'm sure it would help if my posts weren't almost as long as Myers's chapters!  But here, a week late, is my attempt at blogging chapter 5:

Chapter 5 of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes discusses the question, Is there any qualitative difference between high art and pop culture, or is it just a matter of taste? This is a slippery question, partly because of aesthetic relativism, and partly because for the past few decades academics have evaluated all culture in terms of social background and politics.  

Regarding the political analysis, Myers says that surely art does have a social and political dimension, but he refuses to get sidetracked by the academic approach, calling it “the quasi-Marxist assumption that matters of taste and aesthetic judgment are determined by social class.” The political approach would seem to indicate that there is no such thing as a genuine aesthetic judgment, only determinism. It’s really just another aspect of relativism.

Seeing this expressed so simply enabled me to understand something about my own art education. One of my art professors in college told me that the problem with my art was that I had a “Protestant work ethic.” (He wasn’t the only one who made personal comments. They were common.) This is not to say that my drawings and paintings were aesthetically superior and merely unrecognized--not at all!--but looking back, I think the lack of authenticity in my work had a lot more to do with my pop culture habits than they did with my social background.  And when I learned aesthetics from my professors and from seeing first rate art, I didn’t merely move myself into a higher end niche market.  My whole world enlarged.  It was as though I could see new colors that I hadn’t known about before, and perhaps it was literally true.  

Myers says instead of politicizing art, we should evaluate it according to its effects and nature as much as its cause.  The rest of the chapter is about art’s effects and nature.  His ultimate argument is that the experience of high art and pop culture are so qualitatively different that they can’t simply be a matter of taste or social background.

This is a good place to refer to Mark Steyn’s 1997 essay “Twenty Years Ago Today.” (I have finally found in a version that doesn’t require a subscription to The New Criterion. As much as I would love to see The New Criterion flourish financially, I think this essay is so insightful that everyone should be able to read it.  Just remember where it came from.)  In the essay, Steyn is evaluating the progress of American culture since Alan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind twenty years ago, and making the argument that you can’t write off Bloom as an old style elitist (as many have done) for suggesting that college students remove the plugs from their ears so they can hear and think about something other than pop culture.  He’s trying to make the same point as Myers, that pop culture is qualitatively different experience than high culture, not merely a matter of taste:

“Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Bloom’s book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.”

... It is of historic proportions that a society’s best young and their best energies should be so occupied. People of future civilizations will wonder at this and find it as incomprehensible as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and gladiatorial combats.” Confronted by these sentiments, many young readers just shrug: The old man doesn’t get it. Not his fault. He’s just old. In a way, their reaction or lack of it vindicates his final point: “As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.” He’s mouthing away but they can’t hear. 

And most of us of Sir Mick Jagger’s age and younger don’t want to hear, either. To be sure, this or that gangsta rapper is a bit much, and Britney’s a sad old slapper, and Madonna’s a clapped-out provocateur, but what’s wrong with a bit of rock and roll? Nothing. Except that, when it’s ubiquitous, it’s stunting. Paul Simon and I once had a longish conversation about this and eventually he conceded that even the best rockers had nevertheless been unable to develop beyond a very basic harmonic language: There isn’t enough there to teach in a “music” course...What an achievement it would be if every high-school could acquire a classical catalogue as rich as that used in Looney Tunes when Elmer Fudd goes hunting Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny. Carl Stalling, who scored those cartoons, often fell back on formula: If someone was in a cave, the orchestra would play “Fingal’s Cave.” But you can’t even do that any more, because no-one gets the joke.

Please, go back and read that again, several times.  Read the article.  Read Alan Bloom’s book.  I care a lot more about that than I do about whether you read the rest of my post.  

But meanwhile here are a few guidelines Myers gives us for understanding the nature of pop culture, along with a few of my own thoughts about them:

Entertainment

It is a myth that only pop culture is entertaining. The truth is that all art is entertaining; but pop culture is only entertaining.  It can’t bear too much repeated exposure (thus its faddishness) or sustained aesthetic analysis (maybe this is part of the reason for focusing on political aspects?).  You can become acquainted with pop culture, but the relationship is always superficial.  (This makes me think of modern versions of friendship and community.)

Nostalgia

Pop culture is nostalgic.  It’s not an original experience; it’s about reliving one.  The person brought up on it doesn’t learn how to appeal to universal values, only to shared experience.  (This is not an absolute, of course, but a generalization according to the logic of pop culture.) 

The reliving experience point makes me think of “The Chris Farley Show,” a skit from the early 1990s on Saturday Night Live in which he played an interviewer who was so nervously inept that he could only say, “Do you remember that scene where...?  That was awesome!” His guests’ understanding of his questions depended entirely on their having acted in or seen the movie themselves, because Farley’s character could impart nothing of universal value.  This was even the case when he tried to describe something of lasting significance, like Jesus clearing the temple.  

Pop culture, like a Chris Farley movie review, is essentially a location joke.  As a case in point, most people’s appreciation of SNL depends heavily on the shared experience of watching the skits. This used to drive me crazy as a teen, because my family didn’t watch the show and so I never had any idea what half the conversations I heard were about.  Later, as a young adult, I did watch the show and so I got to be in on the joke--until the show went into a decline. And of course, I’m appealing to the location joke nature of pop culture myself by posting a video of it! 

This is not to say that it isn’t genuinely fun to follow a trend or be in on a private joke, but that it can’t easily transcend its original setting (though it can be extended a bit by adding layers of irony). Its primary lesson is “You shoulda been there!”  That’s fine between family and close friends.  But it’s not much of a way to conduct a broader social life, much less a cultural dialogue.

Sentimentality

 

Pop culture is also sentimental. One thinks of Precious Moments figurines, of course, but Myers also correctly connects Evangelical culture with sentimentality. He quotes Abraham Kaplan, saying that the object of sentiment may be morally “worthy,” but the feelings called forth spring too quickly and easily to acquire substance and depth. “To the sentimentalist, what matters is the feeling stored within him, not whether it is rooted in reality.” 

The point is somewhat subtle, but worth considering. If a worship service (or for that matter a movie) jerks my emotions around repeatedly, no matter how worthy the sentiment, my natural reaction is to first wonder that’s wrong with myself, then to feel manipulated and detached from the spectacle.  This is not to say that I don’t feel strongly stirred by art, or the gratitude for Christ’s sacrifice, or love for my neighbor, but that my emotions are limited to human scope, duration and proportion. They are effected by everything from how much sleep I’ve gotten to whether I’ve been arguing with someone. A deeper presentation of these underlying truths can outlast my emotions of the moment. C.S. Lewis noted somewhere that his problem with fear-based preaching was that strong human emotion seemed to have a natural duration of about two weeks.  This observation has helped me in times of crisis.  Even great life conversions,  relationships, crises and griefs have to be digested in smaller emotional increments.  So certainly we shouldn’t be surprised that our response to great art isn’t instantaneous.  

Celebrity

Another mark of pop culture is the cult of celebrity.  Ironically, though pop culture may stir strong temporary emotions, it is actually more impersonal than high art.  We might say that its range is less, or that it has a lower emotional resolution.  Therefore the focus  tends to shift from the art itself to the person to created or performs it.  As usual, I can think of a Lewis analogy. Lewis says that poor art focuses not on the work, which takes both the artist and viewer out of himself, but on the ego of the person who creates it.

But pop culture is not escapist! 

Myers ends this chapter by saying that the problem with pop culture is not that it’s too escapist, but that it’s not escapist enough!  As J.R.R. Tolkien put it, it all depends on whether you’re escaping or merely deserting. (Implying that pop culture is deserting.) He said, “Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?  Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls?”

And finally...Individualism

Myers points out that it’s hard for Americans to accept that there is a difference in the quality of experience between high art or folk art, and pop culture, because we are pragmatic and tend to want quantifiable, scientifically provable results.  Besides which, we are individualistic to the extent that we don’t like the thought that high art requires patience, training and willingness to submit to a master.  

I have learned through repeated experience, both aesthetic and spiritual, that there is much to be gained from submission to excellence. My art instructors, who were mostly abstract expressionists, told me to question authority.  But even they would still tell me to go check out a book on Milton Avery or Robert Motherwell, or better yet, to go see their works in a museum. Even anti-traditionalists have their traditions. In my late twenties, I submitted myself to some atelier style training under well-known portrait artists.  I can guarantee you that although these artists give specific information about the craft, they don’t demand slavish obedience.  You’ll just get more out of your class if you adopt their style for long enough to see how it works.  Then you can adapt it to your own style. John Holt, the unschooling advocate, called this mastery that is worth obeying natural authority.  It’s very different from authoritarianism, which demands obedience because of an outsized ego.  

Myers also says we should be wary of an individualism that tells us we should discover who we are independent of family and community.  I see his point, certainly. In fact, a family could discover new cultural forms together, as my family has learned about classical music through my daughter’s violin studies. But this does bring up an interesting question--what if your inheritance is pop culture? This is the case with many, if not most, Americans now.  Or to put it in a slightly different way, what if you admire Wendell Berry idea of home, yet you’ve no strong community tradition to go home to?  This seems like a very, very important question.