Modern Culture by Roger Scruton

Author:Roger Scruton [Scruton, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, Sociology, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781472969033
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1998-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

Surface and Surfeit

There is a great divide between the high culture of modern civilisation and the popular culture upon which it broods. Some identify kitsch as a cause of this divide, others as the effect of it. Either way it is clear that modern artists have feared contamination from devices which are mechanical, trite and incapable of being used to convey a serious view of life, and that such devices are nevertheless popular, since they require no effort from their intended public. Modernism is a defence against banality: a way of insisting that the audience think.

Technology has also contributed to the divide between high and popular culture. The market can now be flooded at a moment’s notice with products that are both easy to grasp and impossible to ignore. The very fact that we can speak of a cultural ‘market’ testifies to the change undergone by the artistic enterprise in ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’, as Walter Benjamin described it. High culture is an activity in which the producer is sovereign; pop culture, like every market, shows the sovereignty of the consumer.

The invention of the cinema was seen as both a threat, and an opportunity. Some looked forward to a new era of democratic art, of dramas addressed to the whole population, using images that were appealing and exciting even to those who had never read a book. Others feared that this democratic art would subvert the aims of high culture, by awakening the easy-going fantasies which destroy the mental discipline on which art depends.

To understand the cinema we must first understand photography, which is its medium. Painting was shocked into self-consciousness by the invention of photography, though not, perhaps, into true self-knowledge. If the purpose of painting is to copy appearances and to place a frame around the world then, it was argued, photography can do this just as well or better. So the true purpose of painting must be something else – the recording of a sensory impression (impressionism) or the ‘expression’ of emotion (‘abstract expressionism’). In either case, mere ‘representation’ – which is the prerogative of photography – is not the ultimate goal.

Such arguments were put forward by way of saving the art of painting from the threat of the camera, and re-launching it on its path to higher things. Two philosophers – the Italian Benedetto Croce and the Englishman R.G. Collingwood – bolstered the defence of painting by giving theories of representation and expression which made expression the true aim of art, and representation at best the means to it. Photography, they suggested, is confined by its nature to the task of representation: it shows the world, but expresses nothing. It is the visual equivalent of journalism, pampering the appetite for knowledge, while destroying, through its expressive incompetence, the act of communication – the resonance of each to each – upon which art depends.

The argument is wrong: not because photography is an art on a par with painting, but because photography does not represent anything at all.

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