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PARTISAN REVIEW
The modern masses are crude, to be sure, but not more so than the
medieval mob or the Renaissance elite. Indeed, our population is more
tolerant and teachable, if only because more accustomed to change
and more easily reached by prevailing means of communication. But
the influences that make for mass culture come from the depths of
our present life and permeate it so thoroughly that we may cease to
think of them as cultural conditions at all. One such influence is
fatigue, the special sort of industrial and democratic fatigue, which
is not being tired but being drained and mindless, and yet jerky and
demanding as well. All forms of soothing syrup masquerading as art
have been designed, for the most part unconsciously, to allay this
fatigue, to occupy without really using the attention. That and not
religion is the opiate of the people, as indispensable as the four
poisons-coffee, tobacco, alcohol and the dormitives--on which we
depend to regulate our nerves.
Then again, the fact of being accustomed to identical machine–
made products, and at the same time being jolted out of our intimate
habits by every spurt of "progress," makes us seek not more but less
variety in
all
that we receive. Man is necessarily a conservative animal,
and the acme of conservatism is reached by the readers of our cheap
literature, who detect and resent infinitesimal changes of formula and
style. This sensitiveness is transmitted upwards through the agencies
of production until every branch of entertainment is ruled by elaborate
techniques-of-nothing-at-all. The compulsiveness of scientific method
is irresistible: before a movie or an article or a cover-design is (as we
significantly say) "released," its form, tone, length, design, subject,
and vocabulary are put through the collective, fretful mind of a
staff of experts for an obsessive "perfecting" worthy of a better
cause.
Nor is this processing limited to commercial products for nation–
wide consumption: most criticism of truly ambitious works of art
is but pedantic fault-finding based on some standard taken as manda–
tory. We look for what we call the professional touch, and this is not
so much intrinsic as token-like:
he
must know what
we
want. It is
mere luck that there are enough different cliques interested in modern
art to provide the variety which each would carefully expunge from
the work it tolerates. But even so, every group is busy, it
studies
rather
than delights in the art of past or present; we all examine and certify
