Rise, greatness and fall of the popular arts - An essay for a friend
1 - the rise
Two centuries ago, there was no such thing as popular art. There were, indeed, popular artists; artists such as Dickens and Beethoven. The issue of every new chapter of a Dickens novel caused the kind of scenes that modern bookshops experience with each new Harry Potter novel: Midnight openings, crowds of buyers storming in, high piles of books that swiftly vanish; and, on the following morning, universal debate and newspaper articles. As for Beethoven, there is a story of a symphony concert in York in 1823 (while Beethoven still lived!), in which some of the string parts for the Fifth Symphony (you know, the DUH-DUH-DUH-DAMM! one) went astray. When it was announced that the symphony - “The” symphony, as it was already being called - could not be played, the crowd revolted, and would not be pacified until it was played through (though with a reduced complement of strings)!
Popular art, however, as an independent field, separate from “highbrow” art, did not exist. Far from being in any way “lowbrow”, the triumphant figures of European art before, say, 1860, were universally acknowledged as the intellectual and spiritual leaders of the age. Beethoven was treated as Dionysos incarnate (that is quite literally how the writer Bettina Brentano described him in a probably fictitious account); as for what was thought of Dickens, one letter from Sydney Smith (not a man to praise where he did not admire) should suffice. Dear Dickens: I accept your kind invitation to dinner, with one proviso. If I were to be invited by a greater genius, or by a man whose work I more unreservedly admire, I will rescind my acceptance, and dine with the more splendid phenomenon of the two.
At some unidentifiable time, certain genres began to have an autonomous and inferior life. Edgar Allan Poe (who may be seen, as Conan Doyle pointed out, as the inventor of most of the popular genres) was simply a writer, a member of the literary estate; Conan Doyle was already a genre writer, a writer of detective and adventure stories. Likewise, Jules Verne may have been “the first science fiction writer”, but a genre writer is definitely what he was; and the same may be said about Arthur Machen and horror (all genres that Poe practised). The same descent in status and aspiration may be traced elsewhere. Goethe, the acknowledged greatest poet of the age, wrote The sorrows of young Werther; such a subject as would later have been touched only by genre romance writers. Fenimore Cooper wrote exotic adventures without ever losing status; a century later, H.Rider Haggard produced a slew of marvelous exotic adventures and never was regarded - or regarded himself - as a genuine literary figure.
The distinction was never hard-and-fast. Herbert G.Wells, not necessarily a better writer or wiser man than Verne, was universally taken seriously as a thinker and literary man - more seriously than his actual thought warranted. Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling were immediately acknowledged as great writers first and foremost, and only secondarily writers of exotic adventures. G.K.Chesterton suffered no loss in status through his great Father Brown stories. C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien gained general respect - for one thing, where was the critic who dared look down upon the author of The discarded image, An experiment in criticism, or the Oxford History of sixteenth-century English literature?
However, the fact is that the average history of modern English-language letters will find no place for the likes of Agatha Christie, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, or E.R.Eddison. And while this can easily be filed under the heading of snobbery, the question is why this snobbery should exist at all. And a disquieting fact is how often this distinction does seem to correspond to a genuine inferiority in something that can best be defined as mind. It is significant that the writers whom I mentioned as escaping the reputation ghetto of genre writing were, one way or another, respected for their intellect. Genre writers, in general, either do not try to reflect, or, when they do, make themselves ridiculous or irritating. Conan Doyle, the archetypal genre writer, can be said to have an astonishing split in his writing talent: highly, supremely gifted in everything to do with setting, dialogue, character description - so much so that his Sherlock Holmes stories have come to stand, not only for a memorable character, but for a whole imaginative world - he was wholly devoid of intellectual powers. His moments of meditation in the Holmes stories are embarrassing; indeed, you might say that the homage he rendered to rationality in the character of Holmes was the idol-worship of a man to something he knows to be above himself. H.Rider Haggard is, in this, even worse, because he is less embarrassed. He indulges in adolescent philosophizing on a scale that comes close to wrecking even the greatest of his stories. Agatha Christie escapes the trap by aiming carefully, deliberately low; only in some of her short stories (especially the strange and wonderful Mr.Quin stories) and of her very late work (The Pale Horse especially) does she allow herself to try anything more poetic and profound than the simple well-told story. And if one wants to know why she was wise to do so, one needs do no more than look at her brilliant friend D.L.Sayers - with her one-sided Toryism, ghastly snobbery, and inevitable habit of moving from “This is how it is” to “this is how I want it to be”! Who can doubt that by the time of Gaudy Night, let alone Busman’s Honeymoon, she was writing, not well-told stories, but escapist fantasies of a Tory England that never existed?
Yet these writers are immortal. And the reason why they are is in what I said about Haggard: that his pretentious philosophizing only “comes close” to wrecking his stories. It does not wreck them, because the stories as such are simply magnificent. From beginning to end, the sequel of events, characters and locations holds our attention and works our emotions up to shattering climaxes, giving us the primary pleasure of writing - a good story well told. Well told like Homer or Shakespeare told them. The same goes for both Christie and Sayers, indeed for any genre writer whose name you can remember. As long as men can read, their stories will be read.
Yet something is lacking. The experiment is readily done by anyone with a taste for good writing. If we read, in succession, a novel by, say, Faulkner or Thomas Mann, and one by Agatha Christie or Dick Francis, we cannot fail to notice that the latter, whatever its brilliance in invention, construction, setting and characters, tends to lack a moral and intellectual depth that the former takes for granted. The books of genre authors (with the exception of fantasy fiction) are even physically thinner than the corresponding efforts by purveyors of “high” literature. There is something about genre fiction that tends to stunt thought, or, as in such cases as Sayers, to send it along pretentious and unprofitable lines. And the snobbery of the literary profession as such, while undeserved in terms of mere craft - no writer lives who could write a story better than Agatha Christie - does have some contact with reality in that, in certain important areas, even lousy “high” literature writers try harder than even the most brilliant genre authors.
Literature is the one art in which the split between high and popular art runs right down the middle, separating writer from writer. (We could mention music, but popular music is so distant from Western classical music that they practically count as separate entities. I will deal with music later.) In the rest of the kingdom of the Muses, apart from the peculiar case of music, certain arts - in general, the older ones - are taken as “high” in the same sense as “high” literature, whereas two of the youngest Muses - cinema and comic books - are, and have always been, purely popular. The close alliance between cinema and detective or exotic adventure fiction, and between comics and romance and fantasy fiction, is a fact, and shows that these artforms have been taken to be in the same area of “popular”, unintellectual art, as genre fiction.
This takes us back to the issue of why this division should exist; and why, more precisely, it should have come into being in that short span of forty years between 1860 and 1900. Both cinema and comics were brought into existence by technological advances; which suggests that the rise of genre fiction (and perhaps popular music, with which I will deal later) may have had something to do with it as well. The point however is not so much technological advance as such; the art of photography, which also resulted from a similar technological advance, never took exactly the same “popular” cast of mind and direction. Photography, of course, is an older art; the first daguerrotypes were shot in the 1830s, whereas the first pages of visual narrative (resulting from advances in printing techniques) did not appear until the 1880s-1900s, and the first successful cinema reel until 1895. This places the rise of photography before the actual beginning of “popular art” as we defined it. But photography is incapable of being popular in another way: it does not lend itself to the kind of massive, cheap, and capillary sale that comics, popular literature, or cinema do. Photography only enters this context as an accessory to text, that is, by losing its independence. The art of photography purely as photography does not lend itself to being sold on the streets for tuppence.
No: it is not only, or indeed not at all, the relative new or old date of an art, that makes it “high” or “popular”; rather, it is its form and content. After all, literature and music, most of which are “popular” these days, are two of the most ancient arts. The issue has been put extremely well by G.K.Chesterton: “It is not true that the public loves bad art. The public loves a certain kind of art, even it if is bad, and does not love another, even if it is good.” Stories of adventure, revenge, detection, crime, horror, love, have a permanent grip on the public’s imagination. He who offers them to the public will not starve. They are commercially inviting.
I have made no detailed study of this (except for the history of comics, which are a comparative late-comer to the field), but I think I can propose the following hypothesis: the origin of popular art is in popular literature. It comes from a time when the newer arts had not yet been invented, and heavily conditioned them. And the origin of popular literature is in the rise of popular magazines - made possible by the tremendous advances in printing technology from 1840 onwards - which specialize in certain definite genres. These magazines, so far as I can see, begin (in Britain and the US at least) about the 1860s and are aggressively, deliberately sensational in their style and content.
This is central: there were detective stories before there ever was a Conan Doyle - indeed, probably before there was a Gaborieau (the first writer to become known purely for them). A stream of hack-written, poorly illustrated, garish magazines about police, love, adventure or supernatural horror, published purely for gain, had started pleasing the public as soon as advances in printing and cheaper paper (the kind with a heavy acid content that makes old newspapers and cheap magazines so brittle) made it possible to publish them. And however uninterested the publishers and authors of these items may have been in any matter of the intellect - their chief motivation was money - nevertheless they established, almost by default, traditions and genres. They were traditions and genres in which story and setting went before anything else - the story, because it provided the opportunity for sensational and thrilling developments; and the setting, because it afforded the opportunity for intense and sensational illustration.
It was once these traditions of storytelling had become established, that writers started to appear whose talents were peculiarly suited for them - writers who took the development of the story for their great goal, and who were more interested in setting and plotting than in poetic depth or thought. I gave the example of Conan Doyle. One may see popular literature as a waste and indeed to some extent a perversion of the great talents that appear in it, but I think that in many cases it is difficult to see how these authors would have come to writing as a profession if they had not had this outlet available. I can hardly imagine Agatha Christie, for instance, being attracted to writing in any other area. She was a perfectly ordinary middle-class young woman with no intellectual ambitions, and it was precisely the fact of telling a story of love or deception that interested her in writing in the first place. However, I think it is possible to blame the naturally restrictive tradition in which she worked for her lack of intellectual ambition once she had proved herself in her chosen field. All her life she made rather a production of being “lowbrow”, which is not something anyone should be particularly proud of, and which I feel confident she had the intellectual potential to overcome. The genre tradition can be a highway to writing for people who would never otherwise have thought of it, but its less desirable features can also be traps.
The new artforms, cinema and comics, proved naturally suited to conveying the same kind of content and attitudes that had already been developed in popular genre literature. Indeed, there was considerable interchange of personnel and experiences, as writers and artists who had learned their trade in periodical publishing were hired by the nascent studios or by the newspaper syndicates that bought and distributed comics (along with every other kind of editorial material) throughout America. The essentially commercial nature of these enterprises is never to be forgotten; the people who sank money into these new technologies, beginning with the Lumiere brothers, were not looking for an expansion of the artistic consciousness of Western civilization, but for a return on their investment. Consequently, the proven moneymaking narrative forms - apart from being the ones with which most of them will have been familiar in the first place - were simply natural to offer to their prospective public.
Now, music. Music is divided into highbrow and popular, like literature, but in an even more spectacular and apparently conclusive fashion. Those among professional composers who regard themselves as the successors of Bach and Beethoven, working in the tradition of Western classical music, have for most of the twentieth century removed themselves so far from the popular area as to be simply invisible. Only recently have a few composers, Taverner, Gorecki, Pärt, managed something of a popular success - popular, however, meaning no more than among the public who go to classical concerts; which is no more than a fraction of the general public. The average person knows nothing of Webern, Berio or Boulez; when they think of modern music, they think of jazz and pop.
The great split between popular and “high” happened much later in music than in literature, later even than the rise of the new artforms comics and cinema. Until about, say, 1910, no split between popular and classical music could be perceived. Then, between about 1910 and 1920, the earth shook: music, along with poetry, painting, sculpture and architecture, suddenly threw itself into a violently and deliberately abstract world of expression, which excluded the vast majority of listeners from any kind of understanding.
The story is perhaps best told from the opposite point of view - from the point of view of what became popular music. Now, looking at the whole phenomenon from then to now, the central musical tradition of popular music is American - with a smaller but significant thread coming from France, its most famous exponents being Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour. But it is from the various threads of American popular music that popular music throughout the world has repeatedly fed - not unlike the way in which American comics and American movies have been repeatedly influential throughout the world. Broadway musicals on the one side - ultimately descended from Gilbert and Sullivan type light opera - and black music on the other, formed an ebullient and continuously creative tradition.
The first impact of black dance music (ragtime) on European audience was in about 1905. Before then, Europeans had been quite pathetically ignorant of black or African musical talents; while today even the worst racist would allow musical talent to “niggers” - in fact, it would be part of the stereotypical racist view of blacks - - have in my possession a copy of the famous STRAND magazine (the one where the Sherlock Holmes stories were published) in which it is cheerfully asserted that Africans are incapable of melody.
In the first decade of the new century, then, African-American dance bands began to tour Europe, to the dismay of some - who found their music dissonant and ugly - and the delight of others, who could perceive its rhythmic drive and melodic beauty. Now the thing to be borne in mind is that there was nothing new or strange about this. For centuries Europe had drawn strolling or touring musicians from marginal or neighbouring communities - Irish fiddlers, Gypsies, Turkish military bands.
Now, what had happened until then was that European professional musicians had noted with interest, often with delight, the new sounds that these aliens brought, and incorporated them into their music. Irish melodies and Gypsy fiddling, mazurkas from Poland and crash-banging marches from Turkey, had all entered the repertoire of German and Italian musicians; Beethoven himself had beautifully adapted dozens of Irish, Scottish and English folk-songs (his adaptation of The Miller of Dee is particularly memorable - and even placed a “Turkish” march in the middle of his titanic Ninth Symphony (the instrumental prelude to Froh, wie seine Sonnen…). In other words, the arrival of Black dance orchestras to Europe did nothing but replay a scenario that had taken place for centuries.
Except that it didn’t. Yes, the professional musicians noted this novelty and made use of it; but they made use of it in a spirit of open hostility, experiencing it as something ugly and vulgar, and turning their imitation into veritable musical abuse. The “jazz” passages in Stravinski and some of his contemporaries are of singular and sinister ugliness; and in his account of his fictional musician, Adrian Leverkühn, Thomas Mann (a musically very educated writer) uses jazz as the very epitome of the vulgarity of Hell.
Thomas Mann, we must realize, was not so much giving his own view of matters as recreating the whole course of the culture he belonged to. That was his goal in Doktor Faustus: to give an account of what had gone wrong about his country and his civilization. Therefore his abuse of jazz is much more significant than a mere statement of personal dislike; it is an account of the position of a certain thing - namely, popular music of African-American origin - in a certain culture - the culture of Germany just before Nazism. And the case of Stravinsky, Ravel and other musicians outside the Reich shows that it is not German culture alone that was at fault here; the failure to connect with African-American music as earlier generations had connected with Irish, Spanish, Gypsy or Turkish music, was a failure of the whole Western musical tradition - of the direction it had taken in the 1910s and 1920s, of its attitude to itself and to the world.
And what Mann makes perfectly clear is that the negative image of jazz was due to the general perception of it as vulgar. It was felt as shallow, artistically facile and gross. That is, the reaction against jazz was not based on any sense of it as ugly or alien, but, to the contrary, as too popular, too easy to feel and enjoy, too open to the brute masses - or, more specifically, to the hypocritical and narrow-minded bourgeoisie.
This is what happened to all the arts between 1910 and 1920: a violent rebellion against everything that was felt to be middle-class, and because middle-class, shallow, facile, imperceptive. A whole generation of artists in many media turned their backs to their own prospective public with a resonant bang; rejecting the common man’s, middle-class idea of things, the common man and middle-class emotions and desires and ambitions, as hopelessly hypocritical, shallow, self-contradictory.
This movement was well on its way long before the catastrophe of the First World War; but the war confirmed it in every feature of its views, and, by giving apparent support to its contemptuous view of middle-class hypocrisy (constructed, it now seemed, on rivers of blood), it confirmed this new tendency as the voice of the new age. Artists who reached their maturity during or after the war did not, in general, even consider taking another direction than that of the abstractist/anti-bourgeois rebellion. The last of the great popular classical musicians, Puccini, died in 1915; Richard Strauss, who continued to use the traditional language of music into the forties, was in fact a repentant revolutionary, and his later work is not always accounted his best.
It is not exaggerated to say that much of the next generation spat in the face of the public. The grinding and deliberate ugliness of many scores by Ravel and Shostakovich, for instance, is enough to send the average mortal, not prepared for the experience, screaming out of the concert hall. But the most artistically significant work was that of the Viennese school of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, who did not so much abuse the public as simply ignore them, setting up a Society for Private Musical Performances to convey their musical thoughts to a mere circle of initiates. Webern, probably the outstanding one of the three, will never be understandable to anyone who is not a highly trained musician. To many such, his music is a revelation; the Italian composer Dallapiccola was overwhelmed, and had to wholly rethink his approach, after a single brief performance. But to most human beings, it has nothing to say.
Do human beings live without music? Of course not. The result of this mass withdrawal of musicians from the reach of the wider public was quite simply this: that the members of the American, and especially African-American, musical tradition, rooted themselves in public appreciation and developed into a wholly independent alternative tradition, not only in America, but throughout the Western world. From the twenties onward, jazz, American musical theatre, Latin American dance rhythms, and European songwriting traditions, joined together in a fertile thread of creativity, to which the average person responded, and which, in spite of the occasional brilliant reconciliation such as Gershwin’s, remained wholly separate from modern classical music. Jazz struck roots in Europe so fast and so deep that even Nazism was incapable of driving it out of Germany; all the way during the tyranny, local orchestras staffed by local talent played jazz dance rhythms, however disguised, for a German public.
Western classical music is an artform of exceptional intellectual complexity and artistic depth. Its loss to the public - except for the enduring repertoire of the past - was a cultural catastrophe of the first magnitude, and its replacement by the African-American tradition, fine though it is in its own right, was a replacement of the more complex by the simpler, of the advanced by the primitive. Nevertheless, it happened. By the 1940s, the artistic experience of the average citizen, not only I America but throughout the West, was not of “high” art. Painting, sculpture, poetry, were things he read about in newspaper articles. What he went out to see or buy were genre novels, movies, popular songs, or comic books.
2)- the greatness and the fall
Popular art reached its climax in the sixties. An explosive combination of still active and energetic old timers (Louis Armstrong composed his marvellous farewell to life, What a Wonderful World, in 1968) and energetic and confident younger men who regarded the previous generations of popular artists as giants in their own right and panted to measure themselves against them, produced one of the most spectacular outbursts of artistic invention in the history of the world. Discarding all that was mere self-promotion and nonsense (Andy Warhol springs to mind), one still can say that it was in that decade that some of the popular arts, especially comics and popular music, reached their climax. To remind anyone that between 1962 and 1973 the titanic figure of Jack Kirby reached the peak of his Himalaya of achievement is unfair to the dozens upon dozens of other great cartoonists active in the great decade; but one must do so, mention only the greatest of the great, for absolute desperate want of space to mention all the merely great. And where other popular artforms had had earlier “golden ages” (cinema in the 1930s and 40s, detective fiction in the 1920s-40s, for instance), the Sixties still saw tremendous new departures and ceaseless invention. It was a golden age, whose protagonists felt themselves the pioneers of a new world and even of a new way of understanding humanity; and did not realize that, rather, they had reached the peak of a long tradition of invention and creativity, and that not all roads from that peak led upwards - if indeed any did.
To begin with, there was and remains the fundamental fact about the popular arts: that they have begun as money-making enterprises. The first popular magazines of crime and police stories, the first series of cheap romance novelettes, were not motivated by anything higher than the awareness that there was a public for that sort of stories; cinemas and movie distributors, comic book publishers and syndicates, had started purely and simply to turn a profit. And while through most of the sixties the great wave of invention seemed to go with an apparently endless ability to find a public, from 1968 especially onwards popular art echoed with increasing and increasingly brutal reminders that the bottom line is, well… the bottom line.
This was not only a matter of commercial failures and artists losing public; it also had to do with the structure of popular art. Its originators had not been themselves artists; they had been, and they remained, businessmen who hired artists as raw cannon fodder, at best only caring that they filled pages and sold them. In movies, in comics, in publishing - popular music was slightly different, in that it was a bit harder to ignore the artist’s personality - the people who actually did the work and wowed the public were hired hands, who regularly lost the copyright to their own work and could be sacked at will. Jack Kirby found out the meaning of this when, in 1973, his unsurpassed masterpiece Fourth World was shot down in flames because the publisher was unhappy at its relative lack of success. Not failure - relative lack of success. (Kirby’s one creative equal, the Japanese giant Hayao Miyazaki, runs his own company and owns his own products. As a result, he has been able to complete many more projects than Kirby.) The artists may have rocked the world, but they remained hired hands under the control of smaller men.
But this was, in my view, far less important to what happened in the subsequent thirty years, and reduced us to the current condition, than the impact of ideas matured (if that is the word) in the autonomous sphere of the “high” arts, upon the “popular” arts.
We have seen that what might be called the Great Schism between the older artistic traditions and the public took place between 1910 and 1920 and arose from a deep disgust of the artistic classes at the vulgarity and hypocrisy of the middle classes. This had a strong political aspect: hardly one major artist of the period was a friend of liberty or democracy. Those who were not Communists were Fascists. And the reason was in their disgust with the bourgeoisie, its intellectual incompetence and pettiness, its hypocrisy, its grubbiness. Both Fascism and Communism offered a kind of heroic escape, intense activism and something that might pass, in a dim light with a lot of squinting, for sincerity.
Conversely, the popular arts were from the beginning bound to the middle-class ideas and pieties. An important essay by George Orwell, testimony both to his sharp eyes and to his hopelessly unrealistic attitude, described with irritation how popular and children’s literature always stood on the side of what he called “reaction”, and naively pointed at some Catalonian items, where the language of adventure stories was used in the service of revolutionary ideology, as a possible model. In point of fact, popular art was the way it was because it expressed the mind of its public; Orwell’s socialist fiction would have been, as indeed it was any time it was tried, a resounding commercial failure. Stories of love and heroism, of triumphant honesty and the defeat of overwhelming evil, of brave men and sweet women, were its staple from the word go. Its practitioners came mostly from the middle and working classes, accepted their views of morality as natural, supported their values. The very simplicity and unchallenged nature of their values, which spoke of hypocrisy to the “high” artist, spoke of certainty to the first generations of popular artists. The World War which confirmed in the minds of the “high” artist his suspicion of the hypocritical bourgeoisie, produced a harvest of patriotic songs all by “popular” artists, such as George M.Cohan’s Over there! or the British music-hall classic It’s a long way to Tipperary (which was composed by a Londoner and is not and never was Irish). And the first famous clash between the forces of the entertainment business and the Catholic masses of America, which led to the establishment of the Hayes Code, was lost largely because the movie tycoons themselves recognized the validity of the Catholic protest and had no stomach for standing up for what would have been described as their right to peddle smut. The need for censorship had been accepted for decades; all that happened in 1934 was that an effective mechanism for enforcing it was devised.
By the 1950s, everything had changed. The “high” artists that had been the opposition in the early twenties, had now become the establishment, and their work was regularly the object of academic exegesis. Their viewpoint had spread to the universities and the mass media, and respectful articles about them and their successors were a regular feature of newspapers. The moral certainties that had produced Casablanca were melting like ice in the sun. The fifties are remembered as an age of repression, but in many ways they were quite the opposite; the Hayes Code was being pushed and prodded in every way conceivable. By the time Marilyn Monroe moved through dance routines that were thinly disguised displays of sex, movies featuring scantily-clad young actresses and provoking dance routines had become quite a staple.
Sex was a major part of the pressure against the common morality of the past, in part because it was in effect a primary part of Hollywood life. Actors and actresses have always had a not wholly undeserved reputation for sexual freedom. The frequently shifting life, the common if not universal beauty and presence, the need to fall at regular intervals in the arms of people you may not even like (we remember what Tony Curtis said about kissing Marilyn Monroe), all tended to discourage fidelity. But before Hollywood, there had never been a place in the world where literally thousands of young, most often handsome, desperately ambitious, and often not hugely educated, people of both sexes would congregate, in ferocious competition for the Big Break. Nor was t just the competition for work, with its natural and inevitable concomitant the casting couch, that affected the atmosphere; it was the unnatural society of mostly young, emotionally pressured yet lonely people. From the beginning, Hollywood was a boiling cauldron of sex, including plenty of homosexuality. And as this consolidated into a sort of local culture, you had people living in a situation that would have made the most penile Venetian of the decadence gasp, and at the same time producing movies that were supposed to reinforce the ordinary notion of morality.
By the time in which Hollywood began again to push at the boundaries of the Hayes Code, then, it had a very different outlook. The first tycoon, self-made and mostly Jewish, still with the memory of provincial decencies and formidable parents, had been replaced by people to whom Hollywood was often home, second or third generation; better educated, more familiar with modern art and culture. Inevitably, this new Hollywood class accepted with enthusiasm the “high” art view of bourgeois morality as hypocritical; it chimed in so well with its own life experience, in which children could easily experience - long before this was even possible in ordinary American society - four or five divorces. The new Hollywood class had no respect for bourgeois morality or the Hayes Code; first they undermined it, then they shot it down.
At this point we are in 1967, one of the turning-point years. There is an immense confusion of ideas, the seeming triumph of the popular arts, money swishing like water in every direction, success often available for the taking, and behind everything - including the sense of sexual and political revolution - the machine of mass media business, feeding on fads and frenzies and ever in search of new faces and new sensations. In some ways, popular arts have gone back to their roots: thrills and sensations were the core of the cheap magazines to which I trace their development, and sex and violence, hinted or explicit, their staple. Only it is now taking place at another level. Popular artists have become conscious of being artists, and seek the kind of academic and mediatic respect previously granted to the Pablo Picassos or the Shostakoviches of the world of high art.
On this ground, then, meet the old “high” art’s contempt for bourgeois intellect and morality, unchanged and unweakened by decades of establishment attention and welcome; the intellectual and social ambition of the popular artist; and the greed and hypocrisy of the impresario, publisher, or producer. For the last forty years, these forces have dominated and directed the popular arts, infecting them with a nauseating mixture of political correctness that demands that bourgeois morality should always and everywhere be attacked, pretentiousness, and the formulaic abuse of sex and violence.