Problems of the Arts in a Mass Society/Six

All things being equal, then, an intelligent photo essay by Bruce Davidson on juvenile delinquency is more “cultural” in any meaningful sense of the term than a reproduction of an El Greco; and a TV documentary by Chet Huntley on the American image abroad is more “artistic” than a 90-minute production of a Greek play by “Omnibus”; and the NBC-TV “Home” show, dedicated as it was to respecting the growing sensibility and intelligence of the American housewife, was more in the interests of a living culture than the timid support of safe classics on television by either “Hallmark” or “Dupont Show of the Month.”

Part of the problem of standards in mass communication is that the humanists (whom society endows to speculate freely in the public interest) have not really learned to ask the right people the right questions about the right kind of excellence. Instead of becoming becalmed by recollections of the glories that were the pride of Greece and the grandeurs that were becoming to Rome, the humanist must learn to identify more quickly the first glimmerings of excellence characteristic of the arts of mass production and mass communication.

Having identified this new aesthetic excellence, he must teach the mass patron how to recognize and demand more of the same. High standards from past cultures will never be an adequate replacement for rising gradients of taste within our own. Nostalgia is no substitute for vision.

There are certain signs that humanists are taking a more realistic stance by encouraging excellence in the media of mass communication. The Saturday Review’s collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum on an exhibition of “photography as a fine art” extends further that journal’s tradition of intelligent criticism of advertising, journalism, movies, and broadcasting. The fund for the Republic’s Mass Media project has shown in a number of occasional papers how relevant an informed criticism can be. Louis Lyons’ series of interviews on “The Press and the people” for WBGH-TV, Boston, makes one want all the more a continuing dialogue on the performance and ideals of the mass media in American life.

But still more heartening is the emergence of a new generation of creators in the popular arts who are not bothered by what have now become lazy clichés about alienation and the inevitability of commercial corruption. A playwright like Paddy Chayefsky has written some of the best criticism of popular culture available to its own patrons (e.g., the comment on girly magazines and Mickey Spillane in “Marty,” or the entire theme of “The Goddess” for that matter). And Rod Serling’s moderate complexity is what probably gives his penchant for recognizing good material (executive power struggles, the “failure” of success in Hollywood, labor corruption) its effectiveness with his TV audience.

The curiosity of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and William Inge about writing original material for the movies is a great advance of the schizophrenia of the generation of Hemingway and Faulkner between doing “serious work” and doing a movie. What the humanities must especially insist upon is that creators within these new forms not take their artistic responsibilities lightly. Serious novels are not compensation for hackwork.

The mass media are potentially great art forms, and all they need to fulfill their potentials are great artists and great audiences. But this should not be discouraging; it is equally the predicament of every other art. Integrity of form and content, not size of audience, nor complexity message, are the criteria for good art.

The public arts of mass production and mass communication, then, need patrons with more aspiring sensibilities and professionals with more sensitive consciences. The central responsibility of the humanities in mass education from kindergarten through professional school is to create a climate of responsibility for these public arts because on them the sanity and health of our civilization rests. Maverick scholars in established disciplines (John Kouwenhoven in literature, Siegfried Giedion in history) suggest how easy the transition could be when we decide to reinvest our critical energies from and overemphasis on the traditional arts of literature, painting, and music to a balanced consideration of the aesthetic imperatives facing everyone in a mass society.

For example, we train students to be discriminating in the literary choices from grade through graduate school, but we rarely give them a chance to examine objectively the kinds of choices they will make almost everyday in industrial design, architecture, and civic design. Even the long slighted arts of painting and music are lately getting much more of the attention they deserve in a balanced aesthetic curriculum. But the newest art forms brought into being by a wedding of technology and the human sensibility – the photoessay, the feature and animated cartoon, the television play and documentary – these are strangely and myopically neglected in our formal curricula. The longer we neglect them, the more likely we are to be victimized by mediocrity.

We can spare much else, but if we are to develop a mature civilization that supports both private pleasure and public purpose, it is essential that a dialogue of growing complexity constantly examine those external landscapes through which we profess our common interest in order and those interior landscapes of belief and value without which a true community is impossible.

This can only be accomplished if we use mass education at the general and professional levels in many more imaginative, untried, and hopeful ways than we are. This will happen much more quickly if the humanities begin to demand of the future as much as they expect from the past.