of mid‐life and older women” (p. 464).
The show focuses on three middle‐aged women in their 50s from Los Angeles who, in a send‐up of LA, are obsessed with maintaining a youthful physical appearance through diet, grooming, and cosmetic procedures, The premise is that the women discover by mistake that they are still sexually attractive in Cleveland, where, as the characters say, “all the men look like real men and the women look like real women…And everyone is eating and no one is ashamed” (p. 469). Of course, they move to Cleveland, and comedic potential emerges from their attempts to “age successfully” (if unnaturally) and find love in their adopted city. Monetmurro and Chewning demonstrate the complex tensions in the show. For instance, it breaks down one set of norms by presenting older women as beautiful and desirable. The characters are seen by Cleveland men as “hot” and the “men’s reactions to them reinforce their desirability, not just on the show, but also to viewers” (p. 470–71). But at the same time, it reinforces other norms. In portraying the characters efforts to land a man, the show reinforces the notion that women need to find male life‐partners to be fulfilled. Comedy has subversive potential that is tempered by humor, or as they write, “The comic frame walks the line of debunking social order while existing within the same social order” (p. 465).
The Effects of Fine Arts
The media effects literature, along with the mass culture critique, focuses on what we now think of as the popular arts, art forms that arose during the twentieth century and that are produced by culture industries. There are a number of reasons for this. Most notably, the fact that such cultural forms were new, coupled with the fact that they were created by profit‐seeking businesspeople, made them highly suspect to many observers. But it is worth pointing out that cultural objects from the fine arts have also been criticized in the same manner. This was especially evident in 1990s during the “culture wars” in America when artists, many of them funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, came under fire for being indecent and contrary to family values (Dubin, 1992, 1999).
Despite such controversies, contemporary arts advocates claim that fine art is good for society. Such claims, especially of social benefits, have a long intellectual history. We have already seen that the art and civilization approach in the nineteenth century saw a positive impact of culture, but Belfiore and Bennett (2008) trace such ideas back to ancient Greece. In the twenty‐first century, arguments for positive outcomes are often intertwined with claims for public funding (McCarthy et al., 2004). Debates about why the fine arts are good for society have a different flavor than why popular arts are bad for it, but they are both shaping arguments.
Critique
The accuracy of the shaping metaphor, as with the reflection idea, is undermined by two facts: art is not monolithic and the audience is not homogenous. These two statements alone remind us that there can be no simple, unproblematic mechanism by which art shapes society. There are, in addition, three main criticisms of the shaping approach. First, there are serious methodological problems in trying to measure the effects of the arts on society. Second, not only are audiences multifaceted, they are made up of thinking human beings, not drugged automatons. Third, the cultural critique is seen by some to be itself a product of elitism.
Methodological Issues
As with reflection theorists, many shaping theorists have started—and stopped—with art. These authors do not convincingly link the content of the objects they study with the society where the effects are said to occur, as they do not present any data. They merely assert the effect. Adorno and the Frankfurt School are notable in this failing. Other studies have tried to make the link empirically; however, it is extraordinarily complicated to measure media effects. Lab experiments control many variables, but can only measure short‐term effects in artificial settings. Long term changes are virtually impossible to demonstrate, due to the number of factors involved. For instance, consider the reported fall in undershirt sales in the 1930s. Did sales decline because men realized, after seeing Clark Gable’s chest, that they did not need to wear undershirts? Or because women saw Gable’s chest and wanted their men to be like that? Or perhaps men had already stopped wearing undershirts as a rule and the movie reflected this trend, rather than shaped it? Or perhaps the movie had no effect, and undershirt sales fell because during the Depression, people were buying fewer undershirts simply because they had less money?6
Audiences
Shaping approaches often present effects on society without considering that cultural products are consumed by thinking individuals. This way of thinking is called the “injection model” or the “hypodermic needle model” because it suggests that ideas from the arts are injected directly into people.7 It views the audience as passive and uncritical, as made up of cultural dopes. (Or, sometimes, the term is cultural dupe, suggesting that individuals are fooled by culture, rather than made stupid by it.)
In contrast to this is the idea of the “active audience” where adults who consume culture are seen as competent: able to make decisions for themselves, to distinguish truth from fiction, and to interpret cultural objects (see Chapter 9). Indeed, some authors suggest that children are also active, competent consumers of the popular arts (e.g. Hodge and Tripp, 1994). In addition, not only are audience members competent individuals, they are also embedded in social structure. Thus, their reactions to the popular arts are mediated by those around them. Children, for instance, may learn to fight out disagreements from television, but when they apply that lesson to life, by hitting a friend or sibling, their parents, teachers or others are likely to sort them out quickly.
Elitism
Other writers reject the critique of popular arts because they reject the elitist purveyors of the theories. They believe that the cultural critique is merely a moral panic—the situation that arises when elites worry about other people, couching it in terms of the degradation of the popular arts and therefore society (Cohen, 1972). The cultural critique, in this view, is a form of submerged class conflict. Ross (1989) links the cultural critique to the waning of the cultural authority of America intellectuals. No one likes to lose power or authority, and so they look for something to blame, and in so doing they reassert their lost authority. In the cultural critique, intellectuals pin the responsibility on popular culture, arguing that it erodes society, and then claim status based on their superior abilities to “see” that society’s problems are caused by popular culture.
Others point out that the cultural critiques of the past are forgotten, and so, in the future, will today’s concerns. In the 1930s, for instance, parents worried about the ill effects of children reading too many novels (Starr, 2004). Today, parents worry about too much screen time, while reading books is seen not only as unharmful, but as positively beneficial.
Conclusion
The debate over the shaping approach is often reduced to the question of whether or not art affects society. Shaping theorists, who may be placed on one extreme of this argument, subscribe (if implicitly) to an injection model of the relationship. It is easy to reject their ideas, as I have suggested above. On the other extreme are theorists who believe that art has no effect whatsoever on either individuals or society. To them, the popular arts are merely entertainment, and the audience comprised of competent people able to make up their own minds. Although it is true that people are capable, it is difficult to imagine that the arts really have no influence on people or society at all. After all, we live in an arts‐rich society where the fine and
