Posted by Richard on 02 Sep 2021 /
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Today’s pop lyricists don’t poke fun at Beethoven and Tchaikovsky because young listeners no longer recognize those names as possessing any cultural authority or prestige, if they recognize them at all.
Like the disappearance of a certain species of frog or insect, this is a small change that signals a profound transformation of the climate—in this case, the cultural climate. It’s a truism that high culture, as it used to be known, has been steadily losing its authority since the rise of mass culture in the early twentieth century.
High culture remained the superego of a society that still nominally believed in artistic values like genius, originality, beauty, and complexity.
There would be no point in making such an appeal if these critics didn’t believe that the general public is capable of preferring the better to the worse, if only they are given the chance.
The idea of cultural false consciousness put a twentieth-century spin on a quintessentially Victorian idea: that the ills of modern society can be remedied by the right kind of culture.
In his 1988 book,Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, the historian Lawrence Levine shows that Arnold had “an enormous influence in the United States,” where he inspired a generation of the intelligentsia to work for higher cultural standards.
Yet it turned out that the problem with culture had more to do with demand than supply. The same forces that made high culture accessible also created a mass culture that was a thousand times more popular, profitable, and influential. As Greenberg observed, “Because it can be turned out mechanically, kitsch has become an integral part of our productive system in a way in which true culture could never be, except accidentally.”
For instance, if you search for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on Spotify, the most popular recording of the most popular piece in the classical repertoire is the one made in 1984 by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic. The first movement has been streamed about 1.5 million times, the third about half a million (which tells a story in itself). By contrast, the hit song “Driver’s License,” by the teen pop star Olivia Rodrigo, was released in January 2021 and by the end of May it had been streamed 800 million times.
As for books, a recent visit to Amazon’s “Literature and Fiction” section found that the top sellers were a romance novel by Nicholas Sparks and a science-fiction novel by Andy Weir. By comparison,Ulysses, which served Greenberg as an example of the best of the twentieth-century avant-garde, is down around 81,000 in the long-standard Gabler edition (though, since it’s now out of copyright, there are several editions to choose from).
Of course, Spotify and Kindle are imperfect measures of the true currency of any work. But they confirm the impression that people devoted to high culture must already have: that they are members of a very small minority. Just how small is impossible to say with any confidence. How many Americans pay attention to serious contemporary literature, art, or music? An estimate of one-half of one percent of the population—1.6 million people—would surely be on the high side.
People like humanities professors, arts administrators, and museum curators, whose identity and livelihood depended on the prestige of “seriousness,” quickly saw that it was now possible to give up the ungrateful mission of telling the public to like things it didn’t like. Instead, they could tell the public why it was right not to like them.
Ironically, today’s custodians of culture still believe in the Arnoldian mission of culture to improve civilization. The difference is that, for most of them, the definition of culture as “the best which has been thought and said” now appears to stand in the way of that mission instead of furthering it. Instead the watchword is inclusion.
High culture now functions like a counterculture, entailing a conscious act of dissent from the mainstream.
Today Arnold’s dream is turning itself inside out: those he would have considered cultured increasingly have to justify themselves to the uncultured, rather than vice versa. Another way of putting it is that high culture now functions like a counterculture, entailing a conscious act of dissent from the mainstream. Popular culture—television shows, pop songs, memes—is every American’s first language, the one we acquire whether we want to or not. Learning to understand and appreciate high culture is like learning a second language, which requires deliberate effort (and which Americans are famously averse to doing).
Finally, culture is countercultural in the sense that it carries more social risk than reward. Preferring things that are old, distant, and difficult to those that are immediate and ubiquitous means alienating oneself from one’s community, in some cases from one’s own family.
In the twenty-first century, culture isn’t an asset even in the narrow precincts where it might seem most at home. The academy is the closest thing we have to a culture preserve, like the nature preserves where endangered species roam free. But humanities enrollments are plummeting even at elite colleges, and students who do major in subjects like English or art history generally emerge with limited, idiosyncratic knowledge and a developed antagonism to the idea of high culture.
Becoming a cultured person happens on your own time, if at all.
Indeed, the most unsettling thing about high culture is that it is not a means to an end but an end in itself—which makes it the exact opposite of money, our usual standard for measuring worth.
Read More:
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/9/culture-as-counterculture
