Kammen's point about the desire for authenticity is interesting. In the text he states that a person wants authenticity “reality or illusion – as a means of avoiding ambiguities inherent in blurred lines between fiction and nonfiction” (240). Kammen is referring to documentaries, particularly those by Ken Burns. But this desire for authenticity is applicable to other arenas of culture. Particularly, this is seems highly applicable especially in the case of literary nonfiction. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces would arguably be the most evident case. The story is well known by now, after elements of the narrative were revealed to be fabricated there was a massive backlash. The backlash stemmed from the narratives inauthenticity. But was the backlash from the public? That point strikes me as debatable. The book is still stocked in book stores, in the memoir/biography/autobiography section no less. The outcry was from Oprah, who as Kammen himself stated is a new form of the public intellectual.

I know I haven't stopped talking about music all semester, but this is the final time. As it seems to me, the place where the line of argument surrounding authentic vs. inauthentic is in music. Why are there so many revisionist arguments against Elvis? Because he usurped African-American music and put it into a white context, that's not authentic. The same goes for Led Zeppelin who made a career out of stealing blues riffs. The same authentic vs. inauthentic argument could be applied to the same band. The Clash serves as a really good example of this. Their first four records are held in relatively high critical esteem. By the time the fifth record, Combat Rock was released they were sell outs who played at Shea Stadium. But that doesn't mean that these artists didn't sell these inauthentic records. It's an intellectual debate for audiophiles. It seems that there's an incredibly fine line between what we, as scholars, intellectuals and critics, perceive as authentic and what the general populace perceives to be authentic. However, I do not think that it is a complete disconnect. I do not think that anyone would argue the authenticity of blues, jazz, folk or even gospel.

Kammen

Thus far I really like Kammen’s style. His arguments feel bold without seeming overworked. I think the writing is pretty accessible (absence of LCS terms, b/c he is a historian). He also seems to have a gift for effortlessly, seamlessly packing loads of information into a few paragraphs. I also like all the little anecdotes – they are fun to read, give life to his claims.

And although I liked his attempt to distinguish mass culture from popular culture, Kammen does not seem to acknowledge that the definitions he sets forth are his working, personal definitions and are not necessarily universally accepted throughout history/cultural studies. But I do like his historical explanations for his defining these terms as such. It always shocks me that authors devote so much space to debating the definitions of such terms; what is the point? (Not that I think Kammen does so – I am jus going off on my own tangent).

And overall I do agree with his ideas. I can buy his linking the emergence of popular/mass culture (now I am not sure which one it is) with the democratization of art and entertainment. One thing I do not agree with/understand: Kammen places avant-garde art in with other democratizing artistic forces (the anecdote about the theater in the second chapter). I am just not sure that agree with the particular categorization. Especially when taken in its ‘60s context, the avant-garde seems like a niche to me.

Thoughts on Kammen

In section three in the fourth chapter “The Pivotal Decade: The 1930s” Kammen argues that the 1930’s was an important decade because it was the last time that popular culture was the main feature of American society (83). According to Kammen, during the Great Depression people read more by borrowing books more frequently from public libraries. Book clubs also became more popular, while people also enjoyed a wide variety of cheap pulp magazines. He lists other activities such as gardening, and the formation of gardening clubs among women, jigsaw puzzles, bingo, Monopoly, Bridge, roller-skating, bicycling, dancing, craft clubs, theatre groups, etc. (83-85). In a decade that is usually associated with tumultuous upheaval, instability, and mass migration, Kammen presents popular amusements enjoyed by people at home. His evidence seems to support an attachment to place that is comfortable and stable.

For people to enjoy these kinds of leisure, they didn’t need to travel much. According to Mike Steiner, an expert in regionalism and folk culture, the majority of Americans moved less, and the flow of people from rural to urban areas slowed and actually reversed itself for the first time in American history (Steiner, 442) Steiner writes in his article “Regionalism in the Great Depression,” Demographic evidence and folk testimony confirmed that the traditional promise of mobility deferred to an attachment to place during the depression” (442). Contrary to the image of anxiety, displacement, and dislocation that dominates our historical imagination of the 30’s, the 1930’s, as Kammen quotes Warren Susman, was the “the decade of participation and belonging” (84).

Matt Nelson

I think Kammen offers a surprising and rather important corrective to the way in which we often think about culture. In the text he points that we often consider the dissemination of culture to be a top down process, but in reality it is often just the opposite: filter up.

Coming from a traditional literary studies background, my understanding of the canon and its acquisition of works was just the way Kammen described it, top down. But if one stops and thinks about the way culture functions, the filter up model makes sense in a number of situations.

In American Culture, American Tastes Kammen points to the examples of Tin Pan Alley and Jazz. Both forms of music are thoroughly entrenched within our conception of (high) culture. As a knee jerk reaction, we would assume that their acceptance within the upper echelon of culture would be the result of a top down process. But, the reality is that their status is a result of filter up, as Kammen rightly points out.

The dissemination of culture through a filter up process is not unique if one thinks about it. The example of street art readily comes to mind. Throughout the '80s and '90s graffiti artists such a Shepard Fairey and Banksy were viewed at best as vandals and at worst outlaws. Even the language used to refer to these artists reflects their assimilation and ascent into higher strata of the cultural sphere. No longer are Banksy and Fairey graffiti writers, they are Street artists. Also, they venue for their art has changed. No longer are their pieces found on walls, alleys, billboards, parking meters, etc. Instead, their pieces are housed in “proper” art galleries. In 2002 Banksy art appeared in a gallery in Los Angeles. Fairey's art was used during Obama's bid for presidency in the 2008 presidential election. More recently Fairey's art was featured at the Warhol Museum right here in Pittsburgh. From the street to the gallery, clearly, this is a rather astute example of the filter up process Kammen is describing.

There are countless other examples one can point to of this filter up process. From Bob Dylan, to Punk the process of cultural dissemination through a filter up process is one that can be pinpointed. I It seems that thinking of culture in terms of this filter up method is often overlooked. Yet, such a methodology allows one to see a culture in a new and valuable way. This understanding could be particularly useful in thinking of how the status of a given cultural object can shift from high to middle to low (another phenomenon Kammen points to). In such a situation it seems as if there would be an apparent tension between the critical appropriation and the filter up process. One would have to question which method of dissemination or appropriation would be at play and at what strength.

Keep The Arts in Public Schools!!!

“My sense of order restored, my appreciation of the arcane ways of American cultural possibility was vastly extended. The men were products of both past and present; were both coal heavers and Met extras; were both workingmen and opera buffs. Seen in the clear, pluralistic, melting-pot light of American cultural possibility, there was no contradiction."
Ralph Ellison, "The Little Man at Chewhaw Station"


For my final blog of the semester, I thought I would resort back to using intriguing quotes from Ellison, since he has usually been my muse for my blogs. The story that I kept on thinking back to while reading Kammen’s American Culture, American Tastes was one found in Ellison’s essay “The Little Man at Chewhaw Station,” where the author reveals a time when he was discriminatory against his own race in regards to cultural preferences. After talking to a group of four black men, who are coal heavers, about opera, the author later asks, “Where on earth did you gentleman learn so much about grand opera?” What I found so funny about this scene was that the four black workers started laughing hysterically, which leads to Ellison’s embarrassment and shame. Furthermore, one of the workers then answers that all of the men have attended the Metropolitan Opera numerous times, and sometimes were not just audience members, but extras.

The reason why this scene is so relevant to this discuss about Kammen’s text is because it addresses the incongruities of race, economic status, education, and culture. The notion that race, economic status, and education dictate ones taste has always been perpetuated, but Ellison story shows that there are inconsistencies with this formula, that one may be at the lowest class and of a marginalized race, yet still can appreciate something thought to be high-brow. What I appreciate about Kammen is that he deconstructs the borders placed around highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, and thereby shows how fluid their boundaries are and the mobility people have to go from one taste to the next. This is definitely what the democratization of American culture is all about.

What I have enjoyed doing while in Philadelphia has been to open inner-city children’s eyes to the fine arts, which I find so valuable. Although the democratization of American culture has occurred, I think there is still an issue of marginalized people feeling as though they are not able to connect with things they have been taught to see as highbrow, which then makes them feel as though they are not intelligent or educated enough to understand them. I think, however, that these feelings can be diminished by allowing easy access to the fine arts institutions as wells as strengthening art programs in public schools. Although the fine arts have been made more accessible via community programs at art museums and orchestras, what I am worried about is that less and less money is being put into art programs, especially at inner-city schools. Why I find this so troubling is that with the arts becoming less accessible for minority children, there is less of a democratization of American culture, which means that cultural stratification, especially along the lines of race, is reified. I do appreciate Kemmen’s optimism about the permeability of tastes when it comes to race, yet I feel that we as a society might be going backwards instead of forwards when it comes to the democratization of the arts.

I am very interested in how Kammen accounts for the extent of participatory of people in culture. In American Culture, American Taste, Kammen reveals two debates in 1950s and 1980s when they discuss the degree of passivity/interactivity of people to mass culture. This topic reappears in the books we’ve read this semester. Both Kammen and earlier, Levine, see the immediate active reactions of the audience toward a performance as some kind of characteristic of popular culture. For Levine, the elites’ disciplining of audience behavior led to the transition of the status of Shakespeare from popular entertainment to high art. Kammen sensed a danger here. For him, though the passivity of audience in front of high culture indicates decorum, the audience’s lack of interaction of mass culture equals a passive acceptance of mediocre cultural products, which implies an ideological inversion. One reason he provides to this phenomenon is that audiences’ genuine diversity is often ignored.

I am not so sure about the situation over ten years ago when this book was published. But I find Kammen’s quote from Herbert I. Schiller seems quite fit the circumstances:
“The audience does count… The managers of the cultural industries are acutely sensitive to the moods and feelings of the nation’s many publics. It is their job, for which they are paid handsomely, to make day-by-day, if not hour-by-hour, assessments of these feelings. When they are mistaken, as they frequently are, they lose their jobs.” (90) Imagine how this saying would strengthen Steven Johnson’s argument that pop culture is getting increasingly complex! As Johnson demonstrates, popular culture is growing more and more sophisticated in the last century, which in a way proves that in this interaction between consumer and producer, with the boosts brought by technology, both sides are taking progressive steps.

I just think the agency of the audience in front of cultural objects is more complex than just be generalized as “passive acceptance”. Raymond Williams’ formulation of the simultaneous pressure of dominant and counter-hegemonic currents is relevant to this inquiry: The most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis, in complex societies, is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative but also its transformational processes. Works of art are often especially important as sources of this complex evidence. (Marxism and Literature 113-14)

This Culture Machine Kills Fascists.

So we've made it through the entire class and it's inevitable. We need to (once again) evaluate ourselves self-reflexively. What brow are you now that you have thought about it for 14 weeks?

I think there's a reoccurring problem that we (as consumers and defenders of taste) need to come to grips with. Artists don't want to be highbrow, but critics do.

In his discussion of American folk culture resisting the imposition of German Romantic (and dangerously Fascistic) "kultur," Kammen narrates a little story from our old friend Woody Guthrie. Guthrie exemplifies the paradoxes of a modern "folk" artist--incredibly commercially successful, sung in Kindergarten classrooms around the world, and yet connected to the "roots" of some "authentic" Americana. From his popularity we see and outpouring of support for the Tin Pan Alley crowd and protest singers of the sixties, and eventually, the epochal changing of the guard when Bob Dylan sold his soul and "plugged in." A similar kind of seduction to "sell out" took place even earlier, Kammen suggests. He writes that Guthrie "wrote to a friend early in the 1940s, referring to folk singers Pete Seeger and Lee Hays: 'Don't let Pete and Lee go highbrow on you'"...also asking Alan Lomax how "to get some of our upper crusts to listen to the real thing" (Kammen, 43).

This kind of distrust of highbrow art is not limited to folk culture, as we have seen throughout the semester. But I think we need to ask the following question: why can't highbrow/middlebrow/and lowbrow all be authentic elements of American culture?

I can imagine a class where Guthrie could be taught alongside Whitman and Bob Dylan and even Hawthorne and Melville for that matter. Just because Guthrie makes a claim to authenticity (that he can't really fulfill to some because of his commericial success) doesn't mean that he should not be remembered as a central part of our cultural history just like how Whitman was obscure and avant-garde in the 19th century as Kammen also points out.

Quality is not eradicated when we think about the brows, but it is evaluated by different criteria. Guthrie's famous line (later appropriated by Bob Dylan) "Some people can rob with a six gun and others with a fountain pen" needs to be updated for our context. Some people can rob you of an education with a canon and others with a dollar sign. As serious critic of American culture as a whole way of life we need to open ourselves to non-so authentic folk singers, plugged-in rock and rollers and popular artists alike. Can we be highbrow and defend Woody? I think so.