What Reproduction and the Market Do to Highbrow Culture

Many of us in cultural studies and media studies have been fascinated with the reproduction of cultural objects. What happens to culture when it can be reproduced and distributed in a mass way? That’s a question that Williams is interested in in The Sociology of Culture. He talks about many methods of technical reproduction—from the proliferation of print media to the trendy music discs and cassettes of the early 1980s—and considers how the “means of production” in general change the stakes for culture. At the same time Williams talks about the market forces that surround these means of cultural reproduction, and he takes an unsurprisingly critical stance toward them.

In the passage that I want to focus on, Williams suggests that market forces in effect endanger highbrow culture. But is that necessarily the case? I want to look at this passage and compare it to a similar discussion from John Berger’s classic aesthetics book Ways of Seeing in order to compare the two authors’ divergent responses to the question of how mass reproduction in a commodity marketplace affects the status of the highbrow.

Here’s what Williams says. In discussing asymmetries, he points out that there is a tension between “the notion of a necessary ‘high culture’ and the pressures of the market on its continued viability” (107). In other words, Williams suggests that although we feel that preserving and upholding high culture is “necessary,” our commodity marketplace poses a threat to high culture.

This sounds much like Adorno, doesn’t it? In Adorno the market that has given rise to mass culture concurrently makes high culture a sort of endangered species. The endless pounding of the jazz machine overwhelms Beethoven. We know what Lana Turner looks like in a sweater but not what Rembrandt’s best works look like.

I want to turn to John Berger now for a different take on this issue of how reproduction and the market change the stakes for high culture. Don’t get me wrong: Berger is hardly an apologist for reproduction or for the market commodification of art and culture. But he doesn’t say that these things destroy highbrow culture or make in unviable. Instead he argues that reproduction and the market change our relationship to high culture: “Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way” (18). Of reproduction Berger notes that when, for instance, a camera reproduces an art image, “it destroys the uniqueness of its image” (19). It’s that uniqueness that Berger says is the critical change effected by reproduction.

Berger, building on the famous “Work of Art…” essay by Walter Benjamin, explains our changed relationship to high art by discussing a typical visit to an art museum. Because of reproduction, because of market forces surrounding art, our visit to the museum is less an aesthetic experience and more of a market experience: “Now [the artwork] hangs in a room by itself. The room is like a chapel. The drawing is behind bullet-proof Perspex. It has acquired a new kind of impressiveness. Not because of what it shows—not because of the meaning of its image. It has become impressive, mysterious, because of its market value” (23).

Now, obviously Berger doesn’t celebrate the fact that market forces have taken hold over our aesthetic experiences. But in a way he suggests that reproduction and the market, rather than compromising highbrow “original” art, have in fact heightened its cultural or social status by fetishizing its originality. This seems somewhat different than what Williams and Adorno say, doesn’t it? Or, are they suggesting the same thing in different terms? Somehow Berger’s account strikes me as one that’s of more use to us in cultural studies in that it’s, I suppose, a bit more positive and analytical than that of Williams or Adorno. Berger makes me feel like I can do something, whereas Williams and Adorno make me feel pacified.