Problems of the Arts in a Mass Society/Five

School design is especially important because of its long-range effects on design in domestic architecture. It is hard to imagine that pleasurable contact with good school buildings can leave the next generation as complacently acquiescent in jerrybuilt ranch house modern as we are.

On the level of corporate prestige, Reynolds Aluminum is setting in motion a similarly helpful competition when it awards a modern piece of sculpture in aluminum (designed by Theodore Rosczak and Jose De Rivera, so far) for the best business building using their material in the preceding year. Perhaps these same farsighted companies will sponsor free films summarizing the results of their architectural competitions for use in the schools. Such firms stand to gain from a more rapidly rising gradient in American taste and understanding.

That there are commercial firms sensible enough to identify their corporate interest with the long term stability and growth of the total community is evident from Dow Chemical’s recent sponsorship of “Highway Hearing,” a motion picture explaining the Federal Defense Highway Act, and from the Edison Electric Institute’s collaboration with the American Institute of Planners and the American Society of Planning Officials on a film about the planning process, “Planning for Prosperity.”

Perhaps the best way to educate the general public to want and demand adequate city planning is to start with microcosms of good planning in their own experience. Victor Gruen’s planned shopping centers at Northland and Eastland in Detroit and Southdale in Minneapolis as well as his plans for downtown pedestrian malls in various cities ought to be at the center of the humanities curriculum in the public schools.

By considering them, children would begin to take for granted an orderly environment in which the everyday activities of shopping are enhanced by amenities such as landscaped gardens, and sculpture for play and for contemplation. The same kind of schoolroom speculation about other planned places such as Saarinen’s General Motors Tech Center will gradually generate an every-growing demand for order in the total urban environment.

Even the much maligned Levittowns embody for the first time on a large scale important planning principles. Elite critics fail to see the irony in their disparagement of the Levittown’s undistinguished and monotonous designs. For this visual mediocrity is largely due to their own failure to democratize architectural criticism quickly enough. It would be much more to the point if they would assume that the essential purpose of instruction in the humanities in mass education was precisely to influence the kinds of aesthetic decisions Levittowners will later be called upon to make.

The responsibility of the new patron to the external landscape applies in a comparable way to the consumer of mass communication. The public arts that shape our interior landscapes of belief and value – print, film, and broadcasting – are almost as unexamined in mass education as are the public arts of industrial design, architecture, and urban planning. This is probably true, in spite of its total lack of logic, because the humanities as a vocational specialty has regarded its role as being that of conservators of true Culture against the onslaughts of mass production and mass communication.

Obviously with such a prejudice it is nearly impossible to help a mass society seek out and nurture its own distinctive arts. Almost inevitably from such a view the humanities become compensatory for the “inadequacies” of the mass society. Also, from such a perspective, the classics become sterilely the eternal benchmarks against which to measure the trivialities of the present.

This orientation of the humanities as a profession in mass education is not a little responsible for the frustratingly slow growth of the arts allied with mass production and mass communication. The humanist, much more than he knows, has been engaged in self-fulfilling prophecies of despair. If he wants to be an adequate critic of mass communication, he must identify the many kinds of excellence already in the media and use the public schools to broaden the patronage for that kind of excellence.

In practice this would mean much less time on the explication of poetry and fiction, considerably more on the arts of graphics, photography, and photojournalism, popular music and comedy, film and broadcast documentary, motion picture and television drama. And the basic criterion here should not be how well the mass media present the Culture of the past to large contemporary audiences (although under certain conditions this function can be important and liberating), but rather how well these new public arts shape the formless experience of the present for their patrons.

It is not tragic, as Randall Jarrell would have us believe, that the modern school child does not know who King Arthur was; but it is tragic if that child is barely aware of the moral and aesthetic dilemmas of the present because of exposure to mindless and irrelevant entertainment – or possibly, because the poetic temperament has retreated to esoteric self-congratulations with other poets.

This is important to stress because in response to criticism, mass media policymakers, partly in deference to the erroneous assumptions about the humanities they share with their intellectual critics, cite long lists of “classics” recently presented over television, or the number of color reproductions of great paintings reprinted in magazines, or the staggering volume of Beethoven LP’s distributed by the recording companies. This is to confuse the artifacts of past culture with the creation of a living contemporary one.