Minerva's Night Out

Philosophy, Pop Culture, and Moving Pictures

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• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118322987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Minerva's Night Out presents series of essays by noted philosopher and motion picture and media theorist Noël Carroll that explore issues at the intersection of philosophy, motion pictures, and popular culture.

• Presents a wide-ranging series of essays that reflect on philosophical issues relating to modern film and popular culture
• Authored by one of the best known philosophers dealing with film and popular culture
• Written in an accessible manner to appeal to students and scholars
• Coverage ranges from the philosophy of Halloween to Vertigo and the pathologies of romantic love

Section I

The Philosophy of Mass Art

1

The Ontology of Mass Art

If by “technology,” we mean that which augments our natural powers, notably those of production, then the question of the relation of art to technology is a perennial one. However, if we have in mind a narrower conception of technology, one that pertains to the routine, automatic, mass production of multiple instances of the same product – be they cars or shirts – then the question of the relation of art to technology is a pressing one for our century. For in our ­century, especially, traffic with artworks has become increasingly mediated by technologies in the narrower (mass production/distribution) sense of the term. A technology in the broad sense is a prosthetic device that amplifies our powers.¹ In this respect, the technologies that mark the industrial revolution are prostheses of prostheses, augmenting the scope of our already enhanced powers of production and distribution through the automatization of our first-order technical means. Call such technologies “mass technologies.” The development of mass technologies has augured an era of mass art, artworks incarnated in multiple instances and disseminated widely across space and time.

Nowadays it is commonplace to remark that we live in an environment dominated by mass art – dominated, that is, by television, movies, popular music (both recorded and broadcast), best-selling “blockbuster” novels, photography, and the like. Undoubtedly, this condition is most pronounced in the industrialized world, where mass art, or, if you prefer, mass entertainment, is probably the most common form of aesthetic experience for the largest number of people.² But mass art has also penetrated the nonindustrial world as well, to such an extent that in many places something like a global mass ­culture is coming to co-exist, as what Todd Gitlin has called a second culture, alongside indigenous, traditional cultures. Indeed, in some cases, this second culture may have even begun to erode the first culture in certain Third World countries. In any case, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find people anywhere in the world today who have not had some exposure to mass art as a result of the technologies of mass distribution.

Nor is any slackening of the grip of mass art likely. Even now, dreams of coaxial cable-feeds running into every household keep media moguls enthralled, while Hollywood produces movies at a fevered pace, not simply to sell on the current market, but also in order to stockpile a larder sufficient to satisfy the gargantuan appetites of the home entertainment centers that have been predicted to evolve in the near future. Intellectual properties of all sorts are being produced and acquired at a delirious pitch in the expectation that the envisioned media technologies to come will require a simply colossal amount of product to transmit. Thus, if anything, we may anticipate more mass art everywhere than ever before.

However, despite the undeniable relevance of mass art to aesthetic experience in the world as we know it, mass art has received scant attention in recent philosophies of art, which philosophies appear more preoccupied with contemporary high art, or, to label it more accurately, with contemporary avant-garde art. Given this lacuna, the purpose of the present paper is to draw the attention of philosophers of art to questions concerning mass art, a phenomenon that is already in the forefront of everyone else’s attention.

The particular question that I would like to address here concerns the ontology of mass art – the question of the way in which mass artworks exist. Or, to put the matter differently, I shall attempt to specify the ontological status of mass artworks. However, before discussing the ontological status of mass artworks, it will be useful to clarify that which I take to be mass art. So, in what follows, I will first attempt to define necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the category of mass art. Next, I shall introduce a theory about the ontological status of mass art. And finally, I will consider certain objections to my theories.

I. The definition of mass art

Perhaps the very first question that arises about my account of mass art concerns my reason for calling the phenomenon under analysis “mass art” rather than, say, “popular art.”³ My motivation in this regard is quite simple. “Popular art” is an ahistorical term. If we think of popular art as the art of the lower classes, then probably every culture in which class divisions have taken effect has had some popular art. On the other hand, if we think of popular art as art that many people in a given culture enjoy, then, it is to be hoped, every culture has some popular art. But what is called “mass art” has not existed everywhere throughout human history. The kind of art – of which movies, photography, and rock and roll provide ready examples – that surfeits contemporary culture has a certain historical specificity. It has arisen in the context of modern, industrial, mass society, and it is expressly designed for use by that society, ­employing, as it does, the characteristic productive forces of that society, viz., mass ­technologies, in order to deliver art to enormous consuming populations.

Mass art, unlike popular art simpliciter, is not the sort of art that might be found in any society. It is the art of mass, industrial society, and is designed for the purposes of such societies. Undoubtedly, though mass art is an historically specific category, one cannot date its advent with great precision. Mass society itself begins to emerge gradually with the evolution of capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization, and mass art develops in tandem, making an early appearance with such inaugural mass information technologies as the printing press, which itself made possible the popularization of nascent mass art genres such as the novel. As industrialization and the information technologies that are part and parcel of it expanded, photography, motion pictures, radio, telecommunications, and now computerization have been added to the printing press so that technologically produced and disseminated art has ­progressively become the mark of an epoch beginning at least since the late nineteenth century and continuing with exponentially rising intensity into the twenty-first century.

Mass art, in short, is designed for mass consumption. It is designed to be consumed by large numbers of people. This is because mass art makes possible the simultaneous consumption of the same artwork by audiences often divided by great distances. Vaudeville was a popular art, but it was not a mass art for the obvious reason that, on the vaudeville circuit, a W. C. Fields could only address one audience of a limited size in one theater at a time. However, when he translated his routines for the cinema, he could “play” on both sides of the tracks in Peoria, London, and even Philadelphia at the same time. As this example indicates, in refusing to label this phenomenon popular art, I do not deny that there is frequently an historical connection between popular art, broadly so-called, and mass art. Quite often, mass art evolves out of already existing popular art. Ballads, first disseminated through live performances and preserved in memory, in turn, give way to ballad sheets and sheet music, and, ultimately, evolve into records. Carnival freak shows perhaps develop into horror movies, while nineteenth-century stage melodramas provide a repertory of stories and techniques to be mined by early films, just as storytelling, stylized joking, and badinage, and finally stand-up comedy remain the provenance of much late-night television, not to mention sitcoms.

But of course, not all traditional forms of popular entertainment, broadly construed, have been transformed into mass art forms. Cock-fighting, for example, has not found its way into mass art. And mass art has developed certain forms that evince no debt to traditional popular arts. For instance, music video owes its heritage to pre-existing mass art forms such as film. In short, though all mass art may belong to the broader, ahistorical class of popular art, not all popular art is mass art.

Ex hypothesi, what marks off mass art from the broader class of ahistorical popular art is, as the label “mass art” signals, that it is produced and ­disseminated by means of mass industrial technologies, technologies capable of delivering multiple instances or tokens of mass artworks to widely ­disparate reception points. Like the mass manufacture of automobiles, mass art is a form of mass production and distribution, designed to deliver a mutiplicity of artworks to frequently geographically remote, mass consuming audiences.⁴ Mass art is the art of mass society, predicated on addressing mass audiences by means of the opportunities afforded by mass technologies.

Mass art is produced and delivered by mass media. These media are called mass because they make the product available to relatively large audiences simultaneously. It is important to stress that these media are called mass because they make their products technologically available to large audiences, even if they do not actually command large audiences. Television, that is, was a mass medium in this sense before large numbers of people possessed television sets.⁵ The products of mass art are, in principle, produced for a plurality of recipients, and mass technology contributes to the realization of this aim by, as John B. Thompson puts it, extending “the availability of symbolic forms in space and time.”⁶

However, though production and delivery by mass media technologies ­represents a necessary condition of mass art, it is not sufficient to identify a candidate as a mass artwork, since avant-garde artworks can also be ­produced and delivered by mass technologies. Robert Ashley uses the same, broadly speaking, sound-recording technologies as do The Rolling Stones and Madonna, while filmmakers like Michael Snow and Jean Luc Godard deploy the same cinematic apparatus that David O. Selznick and Victor Fleming did in their production of Gone With The Wind. Yet clearly, avant-garde artworks, when produced by means of mass media, are not mass artworks proper, for they are not designed for consumption by mass audiences. Quite frequently, they are expressly designed to confound mass audiences – to outrage bourgeois sensibility – and even when they are not directly intended to do this, they invariably do so nevertheless, since it is a necessary condition of being avant-garde that the works in question subvert or, at least, go beyond conventional expectations.

Avant-garde artworks are not designed to be immediately accessible to mass audiences. They are meant to challenge or to transgress the common understandings and expectations that the mass consuming audience has with regard to the relevant artforms. This is not to say that an avant-garde work cannot be a best seller: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was. However, the explanation in this case has more to do with the fact that people in places like Iowa defiantly refused to allow an Iranian dictator to tell them what they might read, and less to do with their appreciation of Rushdie’s disjunctive narrative strategies.

Indeed, I conjecture that Rushdie’s book, though widely purchased, was not widely read. For in order to be read with understanding and appreciation, The Satanic Verses requires a background of literary history, of literary theory, and of the related discourse of the divided subject that is not at the fingertips of most of the Anglophone reading public.

The Bridges of Madison County (to stay in Iowa) is a mass artwork, but The Satanic Verses is not. What is the difference? The former is designed to be accessible to the mass reading public and the latter is not. All things being equal, any literate consumer should be able to understand The Bridges of Madison County without any specialized background, save the ­ability to read and a rudimentary mastery of the practice of fiction. The Satanic Verses, on the other hand, requires a special background in order to be understood, though, of course, that background can be acquired autodidactically.

Avant-garde artworks can be produced and delivered by mass technologies, but they are not mass artworks. For though produced and delivered by mass technologies, such avant-garde artworks are not structured for ready assimilation and reception by mass audiences. Indeed, they are designed to thwart ready assimilation. In the most benign cases, avant-garde artworks are intended to stretch common sensibilities, while in the more standard case, they are designed to confound them for the sake of disrupting what are perceived to be aesthetic and/or moral laxities.

Indeed, throughout the epoch of mass art, it has been the defenders of the avant-garde aesthetic (e.g., Collingwood, Adorno, and Greenberg)⁷ who have been the harshest critics of mass art. For them, the avant-garde has been both the historical and the conceptual antithesis of mass art. Inasmuch as the avant-garde is the antithesis of mass art, it provides, in an Hegelian fashion, insight into the “thesis” – mass art – from which it draws its program and its purpose. Avant-garde art is designed to be difficult, to be intellectually, aesthetically, and often morally challenging, to be inaccessible to those without certain backgrounds of knowledge and acquired sensibilities. Mass art, in contrast, is designed to be easy, to be readily accessible to the largest number of people possible, with minimum effort.

Avant-garde art is esoteric; mass art is exoteric. Mass art is meant to command a mass audience. Thus, it is designed to be user friendly. Ideally, it is structured in such a way that large numbers of people will be able to understand and to appreciate it virtually effortlessly. It is made in order to capture and to hold the attention of large audiences, while avant-garde art is made to be effortful and to rebuff easy assimilation by large audiences.

Insofar as mass art is meant to capture large markets, it gravitates toward the choice of devices that will make it readily accessible to mass, untutored audiences. Comic books, commercial movies, and television, for example, narrate by means of pictures. And pictures are symbols whose referents are recognized, all things being equal, immediately and automatically by viewers simply by looking. Pictorial recognition, that is, is acquired in tandem with object recognition in such a way that one is able to recognize a picture of something, say of an apple, where one is already able to recognize perceptually, “in nature,” the kind of thing – such as apples – that the picture depicts. Children, for example, often learn what things are like from pictures, before they actually see them.⁸ Picture recognition requires no appreciable training. Thus, mass artforms that rely on pictures as basic constituents will be accessible in a fundamental way to virtually unlimited audiences. Indeed, it is this feature of movies – of motion pictures – that primarily contributed to the international popularity of silent films, which became a global artform just because they could be understood by almost everyone across national, class, religious, and educational backgrounds.

The search for what is massively accessible even tends t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Philosophy and the Popular Arts
• Section I: The Philosophy of Mass Art
• Section II: The Philosophy of Motion Pictures
• Section III: Philosophy and Popular Film
• Section IV: Philosophy and Popular TV
• Section V: Philosophy on Broadway
• Section VI: Philosophy across Popular Culture
• Index