DANIEL BELL
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parodies of Pop paintings and the mindless minimalism of conceptual
art. The exclamation points that end each sentence of the Manifestoes,
have simply become four dots that trail away in the tedium of endless
repetition.
In the revelation of wisdom, the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk
because life had become gray on gray. In the victorious apocalypse of
Modernism, the dawn is a series of gaudy colors whirling in strobismic
light. Today, Modernism has become not the work of serious artists but
the property of the
culturati,
the "cultural mass," the distribution
sector of cultural production, for whom the shock of the old has
become the chic of the new. The
culturati
have carried over, in rhetoric,
the adversary stance against bourgeois orderliness and sobriety, yet they
impose a conformity of their own on those who deviate from its
guarded canons.
In the 1960s, one beheld the "new" phenomenon of the counter–
culture. Yet the very name was a conceit. The "adversary culture" was
concerned with art, the use of the imagination to transfigure recalci–
trant memory or intractible materials into a
work
that could, in its
power, transcend its time.
It
existed in the realm of culture. The so–
called counter-culture was a children's crusade that sought to eliminate
the line between fantasy and reality and act out in life its impulses
under a banner of liberation.
It
claimed to mock bourgeois prudish–
ness , when it was only flaunting the closet behavior of its liberal
parents. It claimed to be new and daring when it was only repeating in
more raucous form-its rock noise amplified in the electronic echo–
chamber of the mass media-the youthful japes of a Greenwich Village
bohemia of a half century before.
It
was less a counter-culture than a
counterfeit culture.
In this double contradiction of capitalism, what has been estab–
lished in the last thirty years has been the tawdry rule of fad and
fashion: of "multiples" for the
culturati,
hedonism for the middle
classes, and pornotopia for the masses. And in the very nature of
fashion , it has trivialized the culture.
VI
Has Modernism been "co-opted," as Herbert Marcuse suggests? In
one dimension, yes. It has been converted into a commodity for
promotion and profit. But in the deeper transformations of structure,
that process can only undermine the foundations of capitalism itself.
The sociological truism is that a societal order is shored up by its
