Lewis Wolpert |
It's popular culture - but what does it mean?
Lewis Wolpert analyses 45 essays from the 60s and 70s that became a ‘classic of of cultural criticism’
Arts in Society - Edited by Paul Barker
Five Leaves Publications, £7.99 order this book
THE 70s are only some 30 years away but has there really been a significant change in the arts and in our culture in general?
Here are 45 essays that were published in the late 60s and early 70s, in the journal New Society.
The editor at that time, Paul Barker, claims that the essays originally published in 1977 have become a “classic of cultural criticism” but have become difficult to find – so here is a new edition.
They are certainly well-written but read rather like brief biographies of the topics they deal with. There are numerous interesting comments and facts.
Art in this collection covers the conventional fields such as painting, music, TV, theatre and films, but also includes marketing and design, and buildings and towns.
However EP Thompson in 1970 writes about the power workers’ strike and notes the certainty with which correspondents to The Times seem to know the needs of honest folks.
He also notes that the clergy are more silent on such national issues and admonishers of delinquents are those like David Frost and Malcolm Muggeridge.
And Reyner Banham praise a domestic appliances which for him are more important than so-called architectural masterpieces.
He also considers chairs as art and unsatisfactory design – how uncomfortable designers have made them, and considers the power a clipboard gives its holder.
Then he deals with the potato crisp, which enables a woman to go into a pub and ask for a bag of crisps rather than asking for another drink, and so she remains a lady.
One is immediately aware of some of the changes since the 70s such as the absence of the internet and computers with infinite games and the interminable emails. The Apple home computer only arrived in 1977.
Football is now almost an art form and British children are now obsessed with football celebrities.
In 1966 the Lord Chamberlain banned “fucking” from the play Loot but by 1975 it was back, and is now everywhere. I’m still a bit shocked by the language now used on TV early in the evening and also just how much sex there is.
The first essay is by Barker himself and starts with the claim that no one other than possibly painters, scientists, and engineers live in the present where hope and experience meet – everyone else lives in a mishmash of future and past.
Sounds profound but to me it is nonsense for which no evidence is provided, but then the arts are not much interested in evidence. And even the next essay by Michael Wood is about nostalgia for the past.
He claims that mass culture is based on technologies such as TV and cheap printing and this could account for the full blast of the increase in pornography. Mass art, he claims, is that which anyone can have a view upon.
John Berger believes it is unlikely that any important portraits will ever be painted again because of the rise of photography. Having one’s portrait painted, he thinks, is merely an act of recognition of the subject’s position in society. And, in any case, he wonders what a portrait or a photo really tells one about the subject.
But photographs of pretty ladies in current magazines can be compared with a Rubens painting of his wife.
Nakedness was then common in such photos which Berger thinks involve a complex response.
Berger also analyses Bacon’s use of involuntary marks in his paintings and Bacon is quoted as saying “that he wanted the paint to come across directly.”
He wanted to paint the scream more than the horror. Berger compares him to Walt Disney as they both deal with alienated behaviour.
Berger also refers to papers publishing shocking photos of war as a recent event and wonders how they affect the public.
Angela Carter, the subject of a current article in Prospect magazine by Barker, has several essays. She sees that faces of women in magazines match the current fashion in clothes and that they look like women imitating men imitating women, and reflect a time of austerity.
The vogue for black lipstick was, she claims, short-lived and instead saying that velvet was back, mimicking nakedness. Clothes are, she says, our social shells, just look, at the Rolling Stones’ audiences. For her, the male nudes in Playgirl and Viva gratify curiosity about the male sexual organ.
Michael Wood analyses the film Clockwork Orange and concludes that it shows that society and criminals have common interests.
He loves Chaplin for dancing on thin ice over dark water which he made seem thicker than it was.
Other topics covered include sunglasses worn on top of the head as a fashion, the work of David Cummins who designed the many ice-cream trucks, The Brothers a TV soap opera about road transport, the Half Moon theatre in the East End, and how Morecambe and Wise used theatrical conventions as their jumping-off point.
These essays on art remind me that the basic differences between art and science – are fundamental. Reliable science is value-free, while the arts are loaded with political, moral, and religious values and opinions.
It is not meaningful to talk either about progress or validity in relation to the arts, but these are central to science.
Art cannot be falsified or validated. In science the individual scientist is basically irrelevant, and all scientists contribute to a common body of knowledge – trying to understand how the world works. I remain confused by the role of arts in society and the regret the absence of evidence about their influence.
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