Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art by Richard Shusterman & Richard Shusterman

Author:Richard Shusterman & Richard Shusterman [Shusterman, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781461641179
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2000-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

II

Since the most bitter and damaging indictments of popular art are directed not at its aesthetic status but at its pernicious socio-cultural and political influence, one might object that an aesthetic defense could do very little indeed to legitimate popular art. Though I have no wish to discount the serious socio-political effects of popular art, the objection can be met by showing that the apparent extra-aesthetic dangers of popular art are directly linked to and largely based on its presumed aesthetic faults. This response should neither surprise us nor be seen as a formalist reduction of the socio-political to the aesthetic, once we recognize that aesthetic taste as a cultural product is itself socially and politically inflected. We can see how the more general indictments of popular art rest on the aesthetic by analyzing the rather comprehensive list of socio-cultural and political charges compiled by Herbert Gans, which he divides into four groups.

The first group concerns the intrinsically “negative character of popular culture creation”–more particularly, that it is produced by a large-scale commercial industry purely “for profit” and is “imposed from above” on its helplessly “passive consumers” (PH 19–20). But behind and motivating these charges of commercialism and manipulatory imposition, we find essentially aesthetic complaints. The charge is not simply that popular art makes a profit (for so does high art), but that in order to be profitable “it must create a homogeneous and standardized product that appeals to a mass audience” (PH 20), thereby sacrificing rigorous aesthetic aims of personal artistic expression to sell out to mass taste. This is an aesthetic indictment against the creativity, originality, and artistic autonomy of popular art.

Similarly, it cannot be the mere use of industrialized technologies that makes popular art undesirable, since high culture’s musical, literary, and plastic arts also employ them. The charge again is a fundamentally aesthetic one, that industrialization leads to standardization of techniques and uniformity of products, which both stifle the free expression of the creative artist and narrowly limit the aesthetic choice of the audience. The former is reduced from a self-determining creator to a wage-laborer in an assembly-line process, while the latter are compelled to enjoy what does not really satisfy them because they are systematically programmed to think it enjoyable and because there is no real alternative on the market. Finally, Dwight Macdonald’s charge that “Mass Culture is imposed from above”7 can hardly be the simple charge of cultural indoctrination, for high culture has always so imposed itself (whether from the court, the Church, the academy, or the powerful sanctums of the artworld). The real complaint is that the imposition is not worthwhile, because the products imposed are worthless–once again, an aesthetic claim.

The second group of socio-cultural indictments against popular culture concerns its “negative effects on high culture” (PH 19). Gans sees only two basic charges here: “that popular culture borrows content from high culture with the consequence of debasing it; and that, by offering economic incentives, popular culture is able to lure away potential high culture creators, thus impairing the quality of high culture” (PH 27).

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