{"id":809,"date":"2014-05-11T08:34:47","date_gmt":"2014-05-11T12:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/?p=809"},"modified":"2014-05-11T08:34:47","modified_gmt":"2014-05-11T12:34:47","slug":"crack-up-taste-anxiety-and-american-populism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/2014\/05\/crack-up-taste-anxiety-and-american-populism.html","title":{"rendered":"Crack-Up: Taste, Anxiety and American Populism"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a post from early February I brought up our collective anxiety over the rules of taste and promised to explore the issue in greater detail, but then got sidetracked with other topics. Yesterday morning (while looking for ways to avoid a big pile of end-of-semester grading), I wandered across a 1946 film noir called Crack-up<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>showing on TCM. The story focuses on an art critic and \u201canti-snobbery crusader\u201d whose art-for-the-masses lectures get him framed for murder (yep, murder). The real culprit turns out to be an elitist museum board member who doesn\u2019t believe in the critic\u2019s populist message (\u201cI won\u2019t be surrounded by people who don\u2019t know the difference between masterpieces and trash!\u201d).<\/p>\n

\"Crack-Up_(1946_film)_poster\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not exactly sure what the intended message is (the plot is kind of a mess: secretly administered drugs that cause hallucinations; forgery and art theft; the aforementioned murder; blatant slurs on modern art; a suspicious blonde)\u2014but what comes through quite clearly is a palpable mid-century anxst over the relationship between aesthetic taste and middle class\/populist identity.<\/p>\n

I think a lot about the issue of how taste is formed and controlled because our relationship to our personal taste portfolio has a powerful impact on how, when, where and why we talk (or don\u2019t talk) about the arts. Like the art critic in Crack-Up<\/em>, I worry about the consequences of ignoring the masses when it comes to evaluating the arts. (I\u2019m just hoping I won\u2019t end up drugged and waking up next to a corpse.)<\/p>\n

In 20th<\/sup> century America, anxiety over the relationship between aesthetic taste and social class was most famously expressed by Van Wyck Brooks in a 1915 essay<\/a> in which he popularized the terms \u201chighbrow\u201d and \u201clowbrow\u201d while disparaging both: The highbrow was a \u201csuperior person whose virtue is admitted but felt to be an inept unpalatable virtue\u201d and the lowbrow a \u201cgood fellow one readily takes to, but with a certain scorn for him and all his works.\u201d Brooks longed for a \u201cgenial middle ground,\u201d but could not locate it in what he saw as the Puritan American legacy\u2014a people caught between high ideals and everyday practical needs.<\/p>\n

By mid-century, social critic Russell Lynes saw the situation in somewhat different terms in his book, The Tastemakers<\/em><\/a>: \u00a0\u201cIn recent years a new social structure has emerged in which taste and intellectual pretension and accomplishment play a major role. What we see growing around us is a sort of social stratification in which the highbrows are the elite, the middlebrows are the bourgeoisie, and the lowbrows are hoi polloi.\u201d For Lynes, the acquisition of taste was not inherently based on class, as most postwar arts workers and their audiences had been socialized to believe, but instead was made up of three common aspects of American life: \u201cOne is education, which includes not only formal but informal education and environment. Another is sensibility, which Webster\u2019s defines as \u2018the ability to perceive or receive sensation\u2019. And the third is morality\u2014the kinds of beliefs and principles which direct one\u2019s behavior and set a pattern for judging the behavior of others.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lynes\u2019 postwar version of cultural egalitarianism posited that Americans of all social classes had the right to express their personal taste, as long as they agreed to properly prepare themselves for the task. Nonetheless, he never questioned the hegemonic bias inherent in his positivist concept of morality; the source for his \u201ckinds of beliefs and principles\u201d went unexamined, as did the assumption that education would lead all classes and cultural types of arts consumers to normative conclusions about what constitutes a good work of art.<\/p>\n

Today, the most common articulation of Lyne\u2019s morality of taste, I would argue, is the concept of \u201cartistic excellence.\u201d We see and hear this phrase at every turn: on mission statements and grant proposals, at arts conferences, in board rooms, in the classroom, at talk-back sessions, and in advertising. Like Lyne\u2019s postwar version of aesthetic morality, normative standards couched in words such as \u201cexcellence\u201d and \u201cquality\u201d feel good to say because they seem so definitive, so sure, so concrete.<\/p>\n

But what do they actually mean?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll have more to say about the relationship between aesthetic taste, social class and \u201cartistic excellence\u201d in my next post.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a post from early February I brought up our collective anxiety over the rules of taste and promised to explore the issue in greater detail, but then got sidetracked with other topics. Yesterday morning (while looking for ways to avoid a big pile of end-of-semester grading), I wandered across a 1946 film noir called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-809","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}