Cultural life
The great art historian Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich once wrote that there is really no such thing as “art”; there are only artists. This is a useful reminder to anyone studying, much less setting out to try to define, anything as big and varied as the culture of the United States. For the culture that endures in any country is made not by vast impersonal forces or by unfolding historical necessities but by uniquely talented men and women, one-of-a-kind people doing one thing at a time—doing what they can, or must. In the United States, particularly, where there is no more a truly “established” art than an established religion—no real academies, no real official art—culture is where one finds it, and many of the most gifted artists have chosen to make their art far from the parades and rallies of worldly life.
Some of the keenest students of the American arts have even come to dislike the word culture as a catchall for the plastic and literary arts, since it is a term borrowed from anthropology, with its implication that there is any kind of seamless unity to the things that writers and poets and painters have made. The art of some of the greatest American artists and writers, after all, has been made in deliberate seclusion and has taken as its material the interior life of the mind and heart that shapes and precedes shared “national” experience. It is American art before it is the culture of the United States. Even if it is true that these habits of retreat are, in turn, themselves in part traditions, and culturally shaped, it is also true that the least illuminating way to approach the poems of Emily Dickinson or the paintings of Winslow Homer, to take only two imposing instances, is as the consequence of large-scale mass sociological phenomenon.
Daydreaming, watercolours, pencil, pen, and black ink on paper by Winslow Homer, 1880 and 1882; in a private collection.In a private collection
Still, many, perhaps even most, American culture makers have not only found themselves, as all Americans do, caught in the common life of their country—they have chosen to make the common catch their common subject. Their involvement with the problems they share with their neighbours, near and far, has given their art a common shape and often a common substance. And if one quarrel has absorbed American artists and thinkers more than any other, it has been that one between the values of a mass, democratic, popular culture and those of a refined elite culture accessible only to the few—the quarrel between “low” and “high.” From the very beginnings of American art, the “top down” model of all European civilization, with a fine art made for an elite class of patrons by a specialized class of artists, was in doubt, in part because many Americans did not want that kind of art, in part because, even if they wanted it, the social institutions—a court or a cathedral—just were not there to produce and welcome it. What came in its place was a commercial culture, a marketplace of the arts, which sometimes degraded art into mere commerce and at other times raised the common voice of the people to the level of high art.
In the 20th century, this was, in some part, a problem that science left on the doorstep of the arts. Beginning at the turn of the century, the growth of the technology of mass communications—the movies, the phonograph, radio, and eventually television—created a potential audience for stories and music and theatre larger than anyone could previously have dreamed that made it possible for music and drama and pictures to reach more people than had ever been possible. People in San Francisco could look at the latest pictures or hear the latest music from New York City months, or even moments, after they were made; a great performance demanded a pilgrimage no longer than the path to a corner movie theatre. High culture had come to the American living room.
But, though interest in a “democratic” culture that could compete with traditional high culture has grown in recent times, it is hardly a new preoccupation. One has only to read such 19th-century classics as Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad" class="md-crosslink">The Innocents Abroad (1869) to be reminded of just how long, and just how keenly, Americans have asked themselves if all the stained glass and sacred music of European culture is all it is cracked up to be, and if the tall tales and Cigar-Store Indians did not have more juice and life in them for a new people in a new land. Twain’s whole example, after all, was to show that American speech as it was actually spoken was closer to Homer than imported finery was.
Mark Twain, lithograph from Puck, 1885.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. LC-USZC4-4294
In this way, the new machines of mass reproduction and diffusion that fill modern times, from the daguerreotype to the World Wide Web, came not simply as a new or threatening force but also as the fulfillment of a standing American dream. Mass culture seemed to promise a democratic culture: a cultural life directed not to an aristocracy but to all men and women. It was not that the new machines produced new ideals but that the new machines made the old dreams seem suddenly a practical possibility.
The practical appearance of this dream began in a spirit of hope. Much American art at the turn of the 20th century and through the 1920s, from the paintings of Charles Sheeler to the poetry of Hart Crane, hymned the power of the new technology and the dream of a common culture. By the middle of the century, however, many people recoiled in dismay at what had happened to the American arts, high and low, and thought that these old dreams of a common, unifying culture had been irrevocably crushed. The new technology of mass communications, for the most part, seemed to have achieved not a generous democratization but a bland homogenization of culture. Many people thought that the control of culture had passed into the hands of advertisers, people who used the means of a common culture just to make a buck. It was not only that most of the new music and drama that had been made for movies and radio, and later for television, seemed shallow; it was also that the high or serious culture that had become available through the means of mass reproduction seemed to have been reduced to a string of popularized hits, which concealed the real complexity of art. Culture, made democratic, had become too easy.
As a consequence, many intellectuals and artists around the end of World War II began to try to construct new kinds of elite “high” culture, art that would be deliberately difficult—and to many people it seemed that this new work was merely difficult. Much of the new art and dance seemed puzzling and deliberately obscure. Difficult art happened, above all, in New York City. During World War II, New York had seen an influx of avant-garde artists escaping Adolf Hitler’s Europe, including the painters Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian, and Joan Miró, as well as the composer Igor Stravinsky. They imported many of the ideals of the European avant-garde, particularly the belief that art should always be difficult and “ahead of its time.” (It is a paradox that the avant-garde movement in Europe had begun, in the late 19th century, in rebellion against what its advocates thought were the oppressive and stifling standards of high, official culture in Europe and that it had often looked to American mass culture for inspiration.) In the United States, however, the practice of avant-garde art became a way for artists and intellectuals to isolate themselves from what they thought was the cheapening of standards.