Travels in Hyperreality (Harvest Book) by Umberto Eco

Author:Umberto Eco [Eco, Umberto]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2014-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

1983

Culture as Show Business

The years 1979 and 1980 were a time when, as some ripened novelties were already being theorized, the first puzzled questions were beginning to be asked about other novelties even newer, forgive the expression. The riper novelties concerned an evident shift in the concept of spectacle: a phenomenon of the ’70’s. Slowly, the crowds, and not only the young, had emerged from the confinement of the theaters. First there was street-corner theater, with its Brechtian flavor, and then its younger sibling, the street fair, and then happenings, then, the celebrations: theater as party, and parties as theater. . . . All subjects on which, as I was saying, a vast theoretical literature now exists; and theoretical literature, as is well known, either kills or at least makes “respectable” spontaneous developments—which are then no longer spontaneous. Now that festivities have come under municipal management, involving all the less marginal strata of an entire city (and thus entertainment has slipped through the fingers of those who, in fact, were improvising at the margin), we will not be so snobbish as to say they have lost their flavor, but they have unquestionably become a “genre,” like the detective novel, the classical tragedy, the symphony, or square dancing. And in the face of all these new aesthetics, sociologies, and semiotics of the festa, there is nothing further to be said.

The upsetting innovation, on the other hand, came about with the appearance of something that has been labeled, with or without innuendo, “culture as show business.”

The wording is ambiguous—as if theater and festival, or the village band playing in the square, were not culture. But despite decades and decades of cultural anthropology (which has taught us that even defecatory positions are part of a community’s material culture), we still tend to speak of culture only with reference to “high” culture (literature, philosophy, classical music, gallery art, and stage theater), so the phrase “culture as show business” is meant to denote something quite specific—and to denote it in the light of an ideology (however unspecific) of culture with a capital C. In other words, the premise is that show business is amusement, faintly culpable, whereas a lecture, a Beethoven symphony, a philosophical discussion are boring experiences (and therefore “serious”). The son who gets a bad grade at school is strictly forbidden by his parent to go to a rock concert, but may attend a cultural event (which, on the contrary, will supposedly be good for him).

Another characteristic of the “serious” cultural event is that the audience must not participate. It sits and listens, or watches; in this sense a spectacle (or what was once a spectacle in the “bad” sense) can become “serious” when the public takes no active part but simply attends passively. So it is possible that the audience of Greek comedy watched while spitting out fruit pits and taunting the actors; but today, in a dutifully archeologized amphitheater, the same comedy is more culture than entertainment, and people keep quiet (and, it is hoped, are bored).

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