STATE OF CRITICISM
57
the question of what exactly should popular culture critics or scholars
criticize or make an object of study.
The pages of the
Journal of Popular Culture
reveal how far they
are from settling the question or even making its contours clear. Apart
from the kind of essay I've
cited~
they are filled with at best extremely
curious descriptive accounts of out of the way "low" cultural phenom–
ena and at worst with heavy, painfully earnest discussions-though
no heavier nor more painful than much of what one sees in most
"respectable" academic journals-of such things as the role of the
automobile in
The Great Gatsby
and with earnest, painfully naive
interviews with writers like Harold Robbins or radio-TV personalities
such as Ozzie and Harriet. The latter article concludes with a judgment
by the interviewers that "through the magic of television re-runs, 'The
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet' offers its viewers entertainment, an
escape from the drudgery of living and, perhaps most of all, a
reaffirmation of timeless values such as honesty, integrity and human
respect. "
I would not want to be misunderstood. I don't think the ragbag
nature of the
Journal of Popular Culture
and its more flagrant
sillinesses are due to some intellectual or editorial incapacity or
perversity but to a nearly total confusion about what it is these
specialists are supposed to be studying and what they expect to find.
Critics of traditional culture have been fairly clear about what culture
is-Matthew Arnold said it was "a study of perfection"-which is at
least a thought-but popular culture, as a field of inquiry, sometimes
seems to be indistinguishable from human activity in its entirety, with
the exception of course of "high" art.
This is what leads Herbert Gans in his book
Popular Culture and
High Culture
to include as elements of the field of his inquiry
"refrigerators, cars, n ews and sports," and led John Dewey, not one of
my favorite writers on aesthetics, I might say, to write that "the most
vital arts are popular music, comic strips, newspaper accounts of crime
and love, articles on the intimate doings of popular entertainers" and a
host of other things including the most matter-of-fact everyday activi–
ties. A writer in the
Journal of Popular Culture
quotes Dewey's list
approvingly and this seems to me indicative of the confusion that is so
characteristic of that magazine.
If
everything is culture or art, then why
do we need the words?
If
art is life and life art, as I know has been a
fashionable formula for some years, then there is nothing to distin–
guish anything from anything else and the task of criticism, which I
think is to make distinctions, is without point.
