WILLIAM PHILLIPS
1'17
taken for granted in most West European countries, where criticism–
or dissidence when it is not in the service of another country- is not
considered subversive.
We also went on to talk about the cultural implications of the
shift. One of the topics discussed was mass culture, which is a com–
plex problem. At that time, many of us thought of it as the enemy of
traditional culture. In 1952, we said that mass culture separated the
artist from his natural audience. As we put it, "It satisfies demands
that it creates." Today mass-or media or commercial-culture has
created a counterculture, a pop culture that is reborn every minute .
The need of pop culture for constant novelty is substituted for the
more genuine kind of novelty and innovation that traditional art and
criticism develop more organically. The result has been a lowering
and confusion of critical standards.
But the effect of this critical chaos on art is more difficult to
determine. It does not mean that individual talents have not been
blossoming, or that first-rate work has not been produced . However,
the effect on criticism is clearer. There has been a certain amount of
socially and esthetically informed criticism by such writers as Trill–
ing, Howe, Kazin, and some others. But there has also been a good
deal of superficial journalistic criticism, abstract theoretical criti–
cism, flourishing mostly in the universities, that has its head, so to
speak, in the sand, and recently, a new kind of criticism, obviously
adapting to the current situation, that amalgamates
Kojak
with Proust,
the Beatles with Eliot, entertainment with theater, and that advo–
cates the application of the same kind of criticism to all these diverse
objects.
A few years ago
Partisan Review
received a manuscript about the
television show
Kojak,
from a critic who taught at an Ivy League
school. The piece argued that only snobs failed to see that
Kojak
was
a work of art to be treated as seriously as Bellow or Malamud or
Mailer. It failed to mention that the rise and fall of
Kojak
had
something to do with the Nielson ratings . Or that the inflation of
Ko–
jak
into art is to deflate it as entertainment.
The effect of the media on art is difficult to pin down, since
there is no way of measuring it or comparing it with art produced in
a society without mass or pop culture. The only advanced countries
without mass culture have mass politics, and the French solve the
problem with conferences to debate how bad
Dallas
is for French
culture.
What can one do about it- other than to emphasize the impor-
