Art and Civilization
A number of nineteenth century intellectuals wrote about the uplifting, civilizing effects of the fine arts. Matthew Arnold (1960 [1869]), a poet and literary critic, was one of these early shaping theorists. He believed that “culture” was made up of the “best that has been thought and said in the world” (p. 6). For Arnold, art included only the fine arts. The fine arts provided uplift due to their “moral, social and beneficial character” (p. 46). Their purpose was “to make reason and the will of God prevail” (p. 42) and they should do this by portraying “sweetness and light” (p. 46). Through their influence, people will be led away from their baser instincts, letting go of envy, spite, hostility, and anger. The fine arts, he believed, should be available to everyone in order to improve the general condition of all humankind. Without their civilizing influences, society falls into “anarchy.”
The spirit behind Arnold’s work was widespread. The famous art historian and social critic John Ruskin thought that art (and nature) were antidotes to tenement living, and that making art was therapeutic for everyone who did so. These ideas were also a key part in the establishment of museums and heritage organizations in both the UK and the US at the turn of the nineteenth century (see Cintron, 2000; DiMaggio, 1982a, 1982b).
Despite the laudable goals of the social reformer and the spirit of noblesse oblige embodied in the actions of these nineteenth century elites, there were also strong currents of class antagonism in the “culture and civilization approach” (Storey, 2015). In the context of the suffrage agitation of 1866–1867 (which resulted in reforms that doubled the electorate by allowing households in the boroughs the right to vote), Arnold (p. 105) wrote:
the working class…raw and half‐developed…long lain half‐hidden amidst its poverty and squalor…[is] now issuing from its hiding‐place to assert an Englishman’s heaven‐born privilege of doing as he likes, and beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.
According to Arnold, the civilizing effects of the fine arts, and culture in general, worked on all classes, but differently for each class. Through education, culture shaped the middle classes as they took up power and leadership and it prepared the aristocracy for its inevitable decline. For the working classes, however, culture inculcated a humbleness and an acceptance of the authority to which they were to submit.
Mass Culture Theorists
The ideas sowed by Arnold in the 1860s bloomed into the theories of cultural highbrows in the 1930s and beyond. These authors believed that as much as high art was beneficial, mass art was harmful. By this time, the concept of “high culture,” especially in its contrast to popular culture, had become firmly institutionalized (the distinction was not as sharply drawn in the nineteenth century, as we shall see in Chapter 12). While intellectuals still sung the praises of fine art, they now worried, in addition, about the deleterious effects of the popular arts. For instance, Q.D. Leavis (1978 [1932]) was concerned that the masses were rejecting the great books chosen for remembrance by intellectuals and professors, who know best, and were instead reading popular fiction, to the detriment of themselves and society. Leavis believed that consuming pulp fiction was like a drug addiction. She was also concerned about the harmful effects of Hollywood movies and advertising. This literature marks the shift from an emphasis on the uplifting effects of fine arts to the “cultural critique” of the mass arts.
A number of theorists writing in the 1950s developed a specific critique of mass culture, relating the rise of mass culture to changes wrought by the industrialization of society. These writers focused on the broadly distributed popular arts (especially television, but also popular music, fiction, and movies), arguing that this “mass culture” is standardized, homogeneous, and puerile in its appeal to the lowest common denominator, implicitly suggesting that it is consumed by an undifferentiated, passive, mass audience.
These authors make firm distinctions among types of art:
Folk art grew from below. It was a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without the benefit of High Culture, to suit their own needs. Mass culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying… Folk art was the people’s own institution, their private little garden walled off from the great formal park of their masters’ High Culture. But Mass Culture breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into a debased form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of political domination. (MacDonald, 1957: 60)
They suggest that mass culture is “parasitic” in that it feeds off ideas generated by the fine arts, without returning a single new thought to them. At the same time, they argue, mass culture strangles folk culture and displaces it. They develop from this analysis a “Gresham’s Law” of culture—the bad drives out the good—whereby mass culture replaces the fine arts and the folk arts. Further, the mass audience spends too much time on unedifying mass art, and in consequence spends less time on useful, educational and productive pursuits. Moreover, beyond filling time, mass culture actively harms those who consume it by inculcating in them a passivity that erodes their critical faculties and makes them prone to manipulation and exploitation.
The similarities of the mass culture critique and the Frankfurt School are evident, especially in their analysis of its pernicious effects, but there are important differences. Writers from the Frankfurt School agreed with the mass culture critics that mass culture was dangerous, but not because it undermined the cultural authority of intellectuals. They worried about almost exactly the reverse. They argued that mass culture strengthened the hand of the elites. Leavis, for instance, thought that the masses had become strong enough to “outvote” intellectuals on the merits of popular versus “quality” fiction. The Frankfurt School, on the other hand, saw the masses as powerless and the cultural industries as all powerful.
Media Effects
The media effects literature examines the impact of mass media on society.1 There is no single “media effects” approach, but certain themes are common. For instance, the media are seen as powerful because they are pervasive. Media present models of behavior that citizens (especially children) might emulate, they set the agenda for political and civic debate, and they do these things in a way that may well be biased. Similarly, the media can distort the audience’s views of the world when the information they provide is selective. This literature focuses particularly on the news aspects of the media (e.g. Philo, 1990), but some of its insights draw from, or can be applied to, the fictional media output that is part of the popular arts.2 The theme of crime and violence is strong in the media effects literature, where fictional violence is seen as carrying the potential to increase violence in society (see Case 3.1).
Media effects can occur at two levels, in single individuals or in society as a whole. For instance, advertisements operate both at the individual level (by convincing people to buy particular products or by encouraging in them a desire for certain lifestyles)3 and at the societal (by fostering the ethos of consumerism).4 The literature is divided, then, between work on individual effects and work on societal effects. A second division revolves around studies that focus on the effects of the content of media texts and those that focus on modality. The former looks at what is portrayed in the
