Problems of the Arts in a Mass Society/Two

In discussing the external landscape created by mass production, it is convenient to distinguish between industrial design, marketing, architecture, and city planning. The raw material for an adequate criticism of all three areas lies ready at hand for intelligent development.

In every case this development would amount to making available to the ordinary individual at a range of intelligible levels the information and theory already circulating in professional circles. In establishing this critical confrontation, the new media of communication are essential – partly to make up for lost time, but equally as much because they are the most appropriate vehicles for this type of analysis.

The newer media of photojournalism, animated cartoon, and television documentary are eloquent enough, in the hands of professionals, to close the “message gap” between the information of everyman as patron and the unsettled conditions of patronage in the new art forms of mass communication and mass production. Since most of these new forms are themselves highly pictorial and visual, the newer media are perhaps more ideally suited to a broadly based criticism than are the more traditional channels of printed communication.

Thus both urgency and the innate qualities of the arts under consideration suggest the wisdom of using the newer media to bring the new consumer rapidly abreast of his responsibilities as a patron of the everyday arts. The general strategy of this much-needed criticism of the public arts, then, would be simply to increase the rate of information flow between professional elites and the mass consumer whose median taste establishes the quality of our culture.

The recent economic and ideological crisis over Detroit’s ‘insolent chariots” provided an excellent opportunity for the establishment of a mature criticism of industrial design in America. Unhappily, the elite continues to choose the easy and inverted snobbism of European small cars for the much more demanding task of explaining to the ordinary man why the psychological symbolism of chrome and fin is immature and unsatisfying.

A successful film like Roger Tilton’s “Seven Guideposts to Good Design” (Louis De Rochemont Associates), on the other hand, aims to develop such increments of awareness in the ordinary customer. There ought to be scores of similar films created, perhaps under the direction of the American Society of Industrial Designers or the Industrial Design Education Association. For these professional organizations, such activity would not only give them present outlets for their idealism, but it would also insure designers future relief against their being squeezed on the producer’s exploitation of immature consumers.