Contradictions of the Intellectual

I know I'm only supposed to comment this week but I couldn't help thinking of Zizek and how he's been represented and understood in different media. He seems to embody all the contradictory things we expect from intellectuals today.

We expect them to give us the answers (for the pragmatic British "post-politicians" this means technocratic knowledge, or how to fix the economic situation); radicals expect the magical formula for revolutionary/emancipatory political transformation (in the guise of a magical bullet, or if we only had a more accurate account of the subject...); his publishers expect him to sell books and to provide a persona accessible to a "wide" audience while still being taken seriously; and then there is the professional status of the intellectual in her field of work (innovation --rereading German idealism through Lacan-- in effect, using one intellectual to reinterpret the works of other intellectuals).

As a psychoanalyst who trained with Jacques-Alain Miller (Lacan's "representative on Earth") his writing can be understood as expressing, in different formats and settings, the four Lacanian discourses. The most prominent one is the "discourse of the analyst" which plays AGAINST the expectations and transference of the would-be analysand: the reader. As readers we expect intellectuals to be the subject supposed to know, the fantasy that someone else has the key to our antagonism. The aim of the analyst is essentially to get us to recognize how our own expectations grow out of this very antagonism. As such, it seems Zizek (in form, if maybe not in content) might give us an insight into how an intellectual today might function in an emancipatory fashion: by liberating us from our expectations of intellectuals and forcing us to question how and what we demand of them.

In Ross’s third chapter, we’re revisited by our old friend: the idea of authenticity in opposition to selling out. It made me think back to our previous discussion and I found myself asking if authenticity and selling out have anything at all to do with the artist or is it merely an issue of perception?

Last week, my own cynical, capitalist soaked opinion was that artists have never been divorced from the money and, while their goal may be to express something, to affect people around them, they’re also trying to get fed doing it. Our romantic notion that the frighteningly unstable Van Gogh should be the standard by which we judge seemed unrealistic.

But when Ross quotes Langston Hughes’ poem, lamenting the loss of jazz to dominant white hands, my focus shifted from artist to consumer:

You've taken my blues and gone --

You sing' em on Broadway

And you sing'em in Hollywood Bowl,

And you mixed'em up with symphonies

And you fixed'em

So they don't sound like me.

Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.

It seems to me that the stakes of authenticity may actually be more important to the consumer/reader/viewer/listener. There is something in this poem that makes me wonder if the concept of authenticity and selling out isn’t more about identity and the ability to control how it’s represented. Ross neglects to give us the rest of the poem but here it is:

You also took my spirituals and gone.

You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones

And all kinds of Swing Mikados

And in everything but what's about me--

But someday somebody'll

Stand up and talk about me,

And write about me--

Black and beautiful--

And sing about me,

And put on plays about me!

I reckon it'll be

Me myself!

What seems so powerful to me about this poem is that it feels like a call to action; while the speaker is riling hirself up, I can imagine the reader, feeling similarly slighted by inauthentic representations, feeling the need to take up a pen and do it themselves.

Ross does a pithy job of describing how the semi-distinct cultures of white and black Americans relied on each other for source material, and makes sure to remind us that words like imitation, theft, and appropriation are used since the system of exchanged favored on color group at the expense of another. But there is something in his excellent historical illustration that masks the kind of psychic damage Hughes expresses in his poem. When the ability to represent oneself is taken away, no matter the reason, whether well intentioned or ill, it does a kind of violence. Representation acts as a kind of psychic mirror through which we feel our sense of self re-solidified; we identify with things we feel reflect who we are.

There was just something in this third chapter, so excellently executed, that seemed to miss the spirit of the voice it invoked. There was something that felt inauthentic to me, a quality learned rather than lived.

So I guess I’ll end, not with a Rothko this time, but with one of my favorite poems by Hughes:

Café 3a.m.

With weary sadistic eyes
Spotting fairies.
Degenerates,
some folks say.
But God, Nature,
or somebody
made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian
Over there?

The Beats, Disco, New Wave Boy Bands and Andrew Ross

I think it's interesting that Ross begins “Hip, and the Long Front of Color” with Frank O'Hara's “The Day Lady Died”. On the poem Ross states: “when it comes to his poetry, jazz almost never figures in the urban taste milieu within which he represented himself, or in the realm of daily cultural events about which he wrote in copious detail...In fact, it appeals to me as a fond reader of O'Hara that this scenario might possibly be read as an ironic, even parodic gloss on the stereotyped Beat devotee of the more 'authentic' world of jazz culture” (67). It strikes me as odd that Ross over looks the fact that the collection that contains “The Day Lady Died”, Lunch Poems, was published by City Lights in the Pocket Poets series. The Pocket Poets series includes collections by notable Beats such as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Perhaps I'm making something out of nothing, but the line to which Ross is referring to seems to be more of a wink and nod to City Lights publisher and O'Hara's friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

But this off reading is symptomatic of the misreading and generally dismissive tone Ross takes in regard to the Beats. Ross does point to the line in On the Road in which Kerouac praises and idolizes the figure of the African-American jazz musician. Yes, the portrait offered in that scene paints Kerouac badly. But throughout the chapter Ross dismisses the Beats as nothing more than middle class posers who willingly chose to live a life of self-imposed poverty. Ross maintains: “the Beats were neither missionaries nor sympathizers in respective solidarity with the people” (86). This analysis neglects Ginsberg's prominent role in the free speech, anti-war, gay rights, and nuclear disarmament movements throughout the latter half of the 20^th century. It also neglects Gary Snyder's role in both political and environmental movements, as well as Lawrence Ferlinghetti's role as outspoken political activist.

Ross' analysis of the Beat's is not the only problematic aspect of the chapter. Earlier in the text, he asserts that there hasn't been a form of popular music before or after Rock 'N' Roll that called attention to itself as both popular and disposable. This assertion seems to be beyond hyperbole. After all, No Respect was released in 1989, after the death of both disco and new wave. One would be hard pressed to not think of these genres as being as much, if not more so disposable than the early Rock 'N' Roll to which Ross is referring. Furthermore, one cannot blame Ross for not having the foresight the see the oncoming juggernaut that would be the teen pop phenomenon that would hold popular music in a chokehold during the waning years of the '90s and the early years of the '00s.

so, what now?

"It is through the retention of the form or containing structure of the category itself that cultural power, at any one time, is able to designate what is legitimate, on the one hand, and what can then be governed and policed as illegitimate or inadequate or even deviant, on the other. The intellectual's training in discrimination is an indispensable resource in such a process. For this is where the intellectual's accredited power of discrimination reinforces the power to subordinate even as it presents itself in the form of an objective critique of taste" (Ross 61).

As I was reading this week, I began to be overwhelmed with the thought that we can never make things better. That no matter how much we try and democratize art, educate people, and create opportunities for people to cross paths with the healing powers of aesthetic objects, we will always be caught up in a tug of war with the system--while simultaneously inadvertently supporting its structure. Scholars like Ross, Said, and Foucault all tell us that we inevitably legitimate boundaries that we are trying to reveal as constructed, so I guess my question is: what do we do?

Do we, as suggested by people such as Paolo Pedercini (apologies to those who have already heard my rant about this) and Dick Hebdige, work to try to appropriate or re-appropriate cultural objects that have become "neutralized by being fully absorbed" (Ross 45)? Pedercini seems to think so, stating on his website Molleindustria.it (which literally means "cast off or cast aside industry) "We believe that the explosive slogan that spread quickly after the Anti-WTO demostrations in Seattle, 'Don't hate the media, become the media,' applies to this medium [videogames]. We can free videogames from the "dictatorship of entertainment", using them instead to describe pressing social needs, and to express our feelings or ideas just as we do in other forms of art." So then, do we enter into a "tug of war" with the culture industry in which we confiscate objects from them which they have confiscated from us, and which they will likely reconfiscate so that we will have to take them back again? And can intellectuals gain some agency through legitimating cultural objects that can actually be used as agents of the system against the system, and perhaps allow us to stop reinforcing the borders that we are trying to destroy? And lastly, will we have to sacrifice some of our standards of taste and "what is good" in order to do so?

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

What is the role of the middlebrow in our cultural and academic representations? In the 1972 film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” the director Luis Bunuel criticizes the Bourgeois lifestyles in France as they mock working class servants and constantly engage in meaningless gatherings of dates, business arrangements and consumption. Two of the sequences in the film come to the bourgeois with a different eye. Throughout the movie, we randomly cut to a long deserted roadway where the characters walk slowly and indifferently to nowhere in particular. This is not a casual stroll, but more like purgatory. This feeling is also examined in the reoccurring meal setups, where the characters gather expecting a meal and are never fed. During the whole film, the characters never eat and are left hungry by all of their desires.

While Bunuel clearly has no sympathies for the Bourgeois (these two elements are more damning rather than understanding), we might consider why we should have sympathy. Throughout the course we have discussed how the working class taste is often romanticized in culture and highbrow taste dictates culture. The middlebrow taste, as characterized by Andrew Ross’ account of the Rosenberg’s letters is always disdainful. There is a feeling by intellectuals that the middlebrow taste in its striving, is just trying too hard and the result is a web of emotions, literary and cultural signals, and attempts at profoundness. Ross calls this “the language of “ordinary people” writing for literary effect … they are writing for a public” (27).

Ross points out: “The problem of petty-bourgeois taste, culture, and expression remains to this day a largely neglected question for cultural studies and a formidable obstacle to a left cultural politics” (29). So, while No Respect was written in 1989, it still doesn’t seem like this question has been sufficiently developed, (yet in 20 years, I’m sure it has and I just haven’t stumbled on it yet). Ross traces the anxiety of the bourgeois, especially the petite-bourgeois. We also see it in Bourdieu’s chapter in Distinction, where through his case study of petite-bourgeois interviews, the fear of not ‘keeping up’ is clearly expressed and the mode of indicating pleasure in objects is always aware of itself. There is a knowledge that one should say they know Picasso and be able to articulate major works or general styles, but the effort and time required to keep such an education is taxing on their well-being and financial security (families running their financials into the ground just to send their children to better schools or buy expensive theater tickets).

In examining Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Ross points to this concern again. The selection he takes from AGK about the Russian Peasant (44) could be more fully fleshed out. Yes, Greenberg holds that the process of the art piece is the real focus and not the “effect.” Yet, he also understands what it would take an individual (especially one from a lower class, - I’ll add middleclass -) to comprehend and appreciate an artwork such as Picasso. Ross leaves out this bit:

“This needs, after all, a considerable amount of “conditioning.” Superior culture is one of the most artificial of all human creations, and the peasant finds no “natural” urgency within himself that will drive him toward the Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for her can enjoy kitsch without effort” (Greenberg, 19).

Ross’ focus on choice and freedom in this chapter does not connect Greenberg’s awareness of how other classes come to art and how they are trained. I think in this passage, we see that Greenberg ‘gets it.’

The middlebrow is the most hated of all the brows, maybe because they buy into a system that keeps them “buying in” (???)

Rock Groups and Intellectuals Killed My Daughter

(the part of the video I'm discussing starts at 4:20)

Have you ever seen the video of Timothy Leary being verbally attacked by Art Linkletter on a New York talk show in 1990 or so? I bring it up because it’s a great illustration of Ross’s point about how both popular culture and intellectuals produce ripples in our culture, albeit in different ways.

First some background: Long-running TV personality Art Linkletter always blamed 1960s Harvard-professor-turned-LSD-guru Timothy Leary for the suicide of his daughter, Diane, who supposedly killed herself due to LSD. When Linkletter met Leary on this TV show via satellite, the sparks flew. But Linkletter didn’t only blame Leary; in his interview he also mentions rock music, poets, and novelists:

“And mind you, I do not blame Dr. Leary for all of this. I think he was an important part of it. Such things as Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane and the rock groups singing the songs of drugs. People who were like Ginsberg the poet and even Aldous Huxley and his Doors of Recep…uh…Perception was talking about the glories of drug abuse.”

Nevertheless, Linkletter holds special contempt for Leary and argues that Leary had a particularly strong influence because he was an intellectual:

“But Timothy Leary happened to be an intellectual, university-based guru and gave the youngsters a kind of a rallying point. They weren’t just talking about hippies, they were talking about an intellectual leader. And he, by saying these things, was giving them an additional argument for experimentation [. . .].”

There’s a lot going on here. First Linkletter’s choices are striking: popular rock music from Jefferson Airplane, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, relatively highbrow British novelist Aldous Huxley, and intellectual Leary. All colluded, according to Linkletter, in marketing drugs to the youth of the 1960s. But each did so, presumably, in a different way—each according to their own kind of authority. “At the heart of the story about intellectuals and popular culture,” explains Ross, “is a structural interrelatedness between knowledge and power” (5). While Jefferson Airplane had some catchy hits, their authority couldn’t quite match Leary’s: the former was merely branded with RCA Victor, while the latter was branded with Harvard.

Linkletter’s list is just one particularly interesting example of how intellectuals and culture are “fractionated [. . .] into countless arrangements of minute differences of taste and consumption, each governed by the authority of cultural competence, whether inherited or else explained by reference to an occupational hierarchy based on education and training” (6).

Linkletter knows this implicitly. Did you notice that his list goes from the force with the least authority and lowest position on the occupational hierarchy to the force with the most authority and highest occupation?

1. Jefferson Airplane (commercial rock group)
2. Allen Ginsberg (NYC Beat poet)
3. Aldous Huxley (British novelist)
4. Timothy Leary (Harvard professor)

Linkletter’s account is striking and reminds me of the way in which Ross talks about intellectuals’ relationship to popular culture.

"Did you do those photographs in there or what?"

"Yeah, I sort of dabble around, you know."
("Dabble? Listen to me, what a jerk.")

"They're wonderful. They have a quality."
("You're a great looking girl.")

"I would like to take a serious photography class."
("He probably thinks I'm a Yo-Yo")

"Photography is interesting because it's a new art form and a set of aesthetic criteria
have not emerged yet."
("I wonder what she looks like naked.")

"Aesthetic criteria? You mean whether it's a good photo or not?)
("I'm not smart enough for him. Hang in there.")

"The medium enters in as a condition of the art form itself."
("I don't know what I'm saying. She senses I'm shallow.")

"To me it's all instinctive. I just try to feel it. I try to get a sense of it and not to think about
it so much."
("God, I hope he doesn't turn out to be a schmuck like the others.")

"Still, you need a set of aesthetic guidelines to put it in a social perspective, I think."
("Christ, I sound like FM radio. Relax.")

---"Annie Hall"


1. I think "Casablanca" is really art, but I am not sure that Baumann does. He might find this
conclusion easier to make if he realized that art is a family-resemblance concept (Wittgenstein)
like the concept of a game. Not all works of art have the same characteristics. Rather there is
a shifting network of features that define art. "Casablanca" possesses some of these features. So
does "Star Wars."

2. I also think Baumann would find this judgment easier to make if he were unabashedly
a cognitivist about value (McDowell) instead of occupying a largely non-cognitivist position. (12-13). Social constructivism is a non-cognitivist position. Only cognitivism about value makes
sense of our phenomenology, our language and our motivations about value. People are only
non-cognitivists about other people's values. We all (probably) think that George Bush was
morally not just instrumentally wrong to start the Iraq War with at best very slender evidence.
The ethical case transfers to the aesthetic case. What Baumann should have argued was that
"Casablanca" and "City Lights" were art all along , but that class and other prejudices blinded
people to this fact until they learned better, not that these films suddenly switched from being non-art to art in 1965. Value is a discovery not an invention.

3. I had a more favorable view of statistics after reading Bourdieu than after reading Baumann.
I just do not know (or remember) enough statistics to understand some of the statistical conclusions he was making nor was he very helpful about explaining them. My view now is that historians should use at most correlations in their analysis not regression, since correlation
has an easy-to-understand common counterpart. Peter Stearns, a professor I worked with while
getting my MA in history, was very opposed to literary sources, but he was also not a big fan
of quantification. His view was that it was sufficient to read through your sources until
you stopped finding new things. I think Baumann should have followed this approach to film
reviews and advertising instead of his quantification approach. Baumann's approach seems like
inaccessible overkill.

4. I think sociologists are too quick to convert everything to the currency of status. Can't I just
like a work of art without worrying about quantity of status it will bring me?

5. I don't think Michelangelo or Raphael or Rubens thought there was such a dichotomy between
art and money or between art and group effort, and if they are not artists who is?

6. We know that Baumann does not like close reading because of his snarky comment about
the analysis of the shark in "Jaws," but does he even like films? At first, I thought he could
not undertake such a large project without liking movies, but the antiseptic tone of the book
leads me to doubt this conclusion. He could have been writing about the history of garden
tools.

Baumann

A few notes on format … I (think) I liked that Baumann italicized key ideas (especially since I skimmed the book). It seems a little corny, but why not use this kind of visual technique in order to get your main points, arguments across? I don’t know how I feel about all the delineations though.

I also think the book feels a bit repetitive after a while … Baumann spends a lot of time reiterating his points, which is certainly helpful, but doesn’t seem to match the audience (mostly intellectuals, professors, students – I would think).

I liked the notion of “opportunity spaces”; it seems like a potentially useful concept for a range of LCS projects. It nicely combines social and economic considerations into a neat package of sorts. It captures all the conditions that create opportunities without trying to relate each condition to the others. The only condition – I would argue – for having an “opportunity space” is intent, because for me “opportunity” implies an underlying agency, not a happenstance. In Baumann’s case, filmmakers saw a chance to capitalized, because television had replaced film as the vulgar/popular medium.

Although I found Baumann’s arguments, generally, quite convincing, I (like a few other people in the class – it seems from the blog) would have liked to have seen some more closed commentary, inter-textual reading, regarding the films themselves. I think Cold War gave us a nice example of how the two approaches – looking at a cultural phenomenon in terms of social/economic context AND in terms of some close readings/viewings, etc – can be nicely blended, complementary. I just think literature (or film, in this case) and its context are totally entangled and privileging one over the other seems a bit incomplete or something.

Also as someone who knows not so much about film, I want more specifics. The lack of examples also makes me question the entire concept of the book … I am still not quite convinced that Hollywood and highbrow should ever be grouped together. I would like to hear more about distinctions between Hollywood films and avant-garde films.

Thoughts on Hollywood Highbrow

In the first hundred or so pages Baumann has impressively blended both history and sociology to investigate the historical changes occurring in the perception of Hollywood films as lowbrow entertainment to highbrow art form. To do this, Baumann insists on examining the artistic production and reception of film as a social process contingent upon a thorough contextual understanding of the economic, social, political, and technological changes from the beginning of film’s inception at the tail end of the 19^th century moving into the 1970’s at least at end of the third chapter.

I do have a few critical questions/observations though that might be taken up during class discussion.

In the second chapter “The Changing Opportunity Space” Baumann uses statistics to show how the advent of television had a negative impact on film going. He writes, “Despite the discrepancies found in the historical statistics, it is nonetheless clear that by the early 1950s televisions were to be found in all but the most privileged of homes, including most working-class homes” (39). It would be interesting to shift the focus, though this is not Baumann’s intention, to find out when the upper class started purchasing televisions, and what societal factors could have motivated the legitimation of television viewing in this group.

Continuing in Chapter 2, Baumann provides a contemporary example of how higher status groups associate certain popular musicians with tackiness and bad taste. He writes, “Examples of popular singers and musicians who tend not only to be avoided but derided by high status groups include Celine Dion and Kenny G. These musicians make easy-listening pop music, a “middle America” genre. The alignment of regional designation with bad taste is another interesting side-thread, that although isn’t really a part of Baumann’s project, is intriguing as a phenomenon that needs further investigation. Why bad taste needs a particular locale for those atop the cultural hierarchy, and how “middle America” came to be a suitable and acceptable place for those making the judgments, would be an interesting cultural/sociological/historical study.

In chapter 3, “The Change Within,” Baumann discusses how directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and George Cukor, preferred to be associated as technical workers, not as artists. One of the reasons why these directors chose not to identify as artists was because they did not yet have the institutional support to promote themselves in this fashion nor did the language of director as auteur have any representational currency yet. It’s interesting though that these directors seemed to responding to the “do you consider yourself an artist?” question from the media interviewing them. How was it then that the discourse of auteur theory was available and seemingly conversational among the media, but it was slower to gain traction with actual directors?

Matt

i paid $40 for this book.

the section that struck me most in baumann's book was the section on academia's role in the legitimation of film as art. (perhaps i've been spending too much time with jeff williams).

for me the argument in this passage felt very chicken or the egg by which i mean, i question if it was it academia that aided in film's legitimation or was it because film was being seen more and more as art that academia took notice? it's hard to say really. perhaps my problem is in the personification of academia. i found myself saying that people make up academia and it's important to remember it is the action of individuals that does the legitimation. but the thought stopped there.

so i did what i always do when i'm struggling with a text: roll my eyes and close it. staring down at the dust jacket i only found mona lisa's impertinent smirk mocking me. i sneered and said, "and i paid forty dollars for this book?!"

then a gear shifted. why did i pay so much for this book?

first of all it's hard cover. not many academic books warrant that. in fact as soon as i touched it i said, "oh no, this is gonna cost me."

i then checked the back to see who the publisher is: princeton. "dang. princeton."

and kathy's a pretty smart lady; i doubt she would have assigned it if it weren't a significant work.

significant indeed. all around this text are signs that scream, "I'M OF CONSEQUENCE! THIS IS A SERIOUS TEXT." the book itself (as opposed to the text) does a pretty good job of proving baumann's point that academia is a power of legitimization, at least for grad students. and instead of doubting the text and its soulless writing, i doubt myself, my ability to recognize "good" work. we have kathy, the author, the publisher, the mona lisa, the princeton name and all the prestige imbued by the people who've made it a great school channeled into one text, telling me what to think.

and i agree that, while unbearably dry, this book is important.

but can i even claim that opinion as my own anymore?

so while i await tomorrow's class to shed some light on this text, i'll contemplate this rothko:

I think Baumann’s book affords us a good example of analyzing a cultural phenomenon from the perspective of sociology and maybe history. He has come down to every social aspect you can think of to account for the rising status of American film. Targeted at American film, he compares filmgoing in contexts of different countries; he anatomizes the specific roles inside the film production as well as the social and historian causes of the formation of the audiences; in a Bourdieu’s sense he stresses the role of the intellectuals in constructing the notion of American film as art. Sociologists are known for studying the arts in a way that focusing on constructing images of art as a social type and therefore have been criticized by art professionals for a lack of attention to the creative process and individual artistic personalities. But Baumann here managed to acknowledge the importance of aesthetic imperatives and the individual creative process by covering the self-promotion of directors (though not in length). At last he draws a general schema “the legitimation framework” that can be applied to the study of other artistic media, which is worth considering.

The question I am thinking about is the contradiction between his whole project trying to give reasons for Hollywood’s changing into art, and the perspective he adopts—the social constructionism. When answering why European intellectuals were willing to perceive film as art much earlier than the American intellectuals, he charges the non-equivalence to the different climate and culture in the two places at that time, and says: “Neither reason is based on a perception that European films were more artistic than American films.” (29) By saying so, Baumann dismisses the notion of art, and that’s the typical social constructionist way of viewing art—the notion of art is just a matter of social convention. If so, why would he bother so much to defense Hollywood/American film, claiming that we Americans certainly can produce artistic films—it’s just we weren’t given the opportunity earlier before. In the same page with the quote above, he indicates that Europeans can make it so early to treat film as art because their culture “was characterized by a withdrawal from aesthetic traditions and a search for alternative models.” For me, this revolutionary search within the expressing form itself, is more than anything the characteristic of art.

Hollywood and Race

Although some would agree that Baumann should not have left out the aesthetic side of film history, I believe he has every reason to, especially considering that the success of a film and the acclaim of the director at times does not have anything to do with aesthetic quality. I definitely agree with Baumann that if one wants to study the history of film, it is best to study it from a sociological perspective, examining how economic, political, cultural, and social events shaped films. To claim that every film that has been included in the film canon is there because of its aesthetic and artistic quality is simply untrue. At times, success has nothing to do with quality, and this is hard to admit.

For my case-in-point, I would like to use the brilliant African-American director, Melvin Van Peebles as an example of how Hollywood in the 1960s still undermined directors of color, despite the fact that their films were of aesthetic quality. Upon directing several short films, notably Pickup Men for Herrick, Peebles attempted to get Hollywood to screen his work. However, Peebles was unable to find anyone there who was willing to hire him as a director. Fortunately, Henry Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, after viewing Peebles work, decided to screen his films, which led to Peebles moving to Paris to continue his work.

What I find very disturbing, however, is the fact that Peebles was only approached by Hollywood ,after making his first feature length film, The Story of the Three-Day Pass, because they mistook him for a French director. Stories likes these prove unequivocally, that the study of film history cannot be placed solely on aesthetics. Baumann's endeavor to re-position film history, definitely has motivated me to examine works in and outside of the American film canon not only from an aesthetic perspective, but to try to study the historical times out of which they were produced, where I am positive that I would find that certain films were not higher in aesthetic quality, but simply had more of an opportunity to succeed than others.

purification and venues

While reading Baumann I realized how little I know of film history. It was helpful that he organized his sociology of the film industry along the same lines as Bourdieu or Latour (mentioning actors and networks). By placing the individual films or art-objects on the same plane as the institutions, discourses, venues, and sites of consumption which make them possible, he was able to dispel an "idealist" version of film history in which supposedly great films rise to the top of their own accord.

Against this notion of the purification of the field, Baumann recounts the transition of venues in chapter three and the economic factors that provoked this change. The effect of suburbia on cinema-going gave rise to the drive-in movie theater. Here we have something crassly non-artistic (the deployment of mass-produced dormitories in the landscape) seriously shapes the manner and reason for consuming movies. Its a shift towards the private experience, the couple or the family. "Overall," Baumann writes, "this change in the mode of exhibition did not affect the composition of the audience; it merely reflected changing residential patterns" (90).

The development of the art house allowed theaters to cater to specific interests of a given niche community, whether that be the highbrow avant-garde or foreign films for populations of recent immigrants. When I lived in North Carolina there was an independent (i guess "art house") theater that switched formats to show films from India. I remember thinking it appeared as if they were showing these films (which were widely consumed by the large population of Indian immigrants in the Research Triangle Park region) to subsidize their more "arty" (and less attended) movies.

By placing the economic and institutional factors on the same footing as the development of film as an academic or intellectual discourse, as well as the directors themselves increasingly adopting the stance of artists, Baumann brings the notion of a purified field of high film back into its mucky relations. Rather than tarnishing some idealized image, as a reader, I found myself more appreciative of the process.

No More Close Readings Please!

Ugggg! As someone who has sat through years of film school close readings of films, it was refreshing for me to discover Hollywood Highbrow last semester. When I first came to cmu, I was shocked by the idea that anyone would discuss the industry or economic factors involving film and not simply the intertextuality of film. Now I must wonder why film studies hasn't moved more in this direction. I admire the sociological approach Baumann is taking as well as its correlation to Bourdieu's Fields of Cultural Production. This period is especially important for film studies where genre is heightened and art house makes money. Like Thomas, I too struggle with this need to analyze the outside factors without looking to aesthetics of the form itself. Then again, this has been done, so much so that when I wanted to jump into melodrama studies I could not fathom a topic that hadn't been analyzed in multiple books and articles already. I think it is fair to say that we can combine this sociological approach with other aesthetic approaches.

There was an intellectualizing of film during this time in a big way that cannot be easily ignored. When I come to a Godard film, I certainly come to it with a range of cultural capital, yet (like Thomas) I am moved by "feelings" and "emotions" from the aesthetic as well as its intellectual dilemmas. This is one element that Baumann could have looked for, not just by the form itself, but by the other industry and cultural cues that indicate the synthesis of intellectual discourse and visual notes. This is why I am so interested in film marketing during this era, especially in the growth of high-brow art house films. While the reviews cannot be ignored and certainly the growth of college curricula helped develop the field, marketing also moves back to the visual and the sensual. With the two ads above for L'Avventura we see the examples of this, the review driven intellectual discussion encouraging ads and the visual stimulating image of Monica Vitti. It demands you to look at her ! Theaters are also an interesting example of creating visual spaces for this new surge in intellectualism with ethnic, newsreel, and nickelodeons literally transforming their spaces to attract audiences. They created lobbies that looked and were meant to feel like museums and the Paris streets.

While I agree that we can't ignore the aesthetic of films (the feelings, the emotions, the inspiration and inter textual nature of film making and filmmakers) it is also increasingly impossible to ignore that film is an art driven by a money making industry. Art house and B-Movies are interesting to us now because they were a profitable market in the 1950s and 60s and because intellectual film scholars took up their cause in the 1970s film institutions and journals, not to mention it became profitable to exhibit them via TV, VHS, CABLE, DVD, and now CRITERION/KINO.

To think that we would have had even more films to see and discuss if it weren't for the economic implausibility of maintaining complete film archives before this era. Baumann gives us a way to quantify and understand why such films and movements succeeded beyond aesthetics and its all tied to money.

One more note! I agree that this is why sociologists aren't filmmakers, but they do make fantastic film scholars because they know how and where to look beyond the text. Some of the most well-regarded sociologist turned film scholars; Robert Sklar's "Movie-Made America" and Douglas Gomery's numerous books including "Shared Pleasures" are nearly canonized texts in film history.

Last note! Baumann needs some help with understanding film canons. I find it hard to believe that anyone within the field considers the Academy or AFI lists to be anyway a measure of the great film canon. Other than 1001 movies you must see before you die (Don't laugh, it's actually awesome, and a whole range of film scholars including MacCabe contribute to it) We have Paul Schrader's (screenwriter for Taxi Driver, director of the remake of Cat People... among others) Film Comment article which is modeled after Bloom's Western Civilization Canon.

Maybe we're not as autonomous as we thought!

Attack of the Killer B's

I’ve always been fascinated with B movies of the 50s-70s, so I was really struck by a comment that Baumann makes in chapter 3. Talking about the rise of so-called prestige productions, he explains, “By the late 1940s audiences had come to expect the professionalism and craftsmanship of prestige productions in all films. ‘B’ quality entertainment could be had for free on television” (94).It’s a brief but interesting argument: since TV offered free but relatively low quality entertainment, one angle for Hollywood to take was to offer more high-quality stuff. I kept this comment in the back of my mind, and while I read Baumann describing the growing art world for Hollywood in the 50s and 60s, I couldn’t help but think about the growing industry of B movies that occurred during just this period. I want to suggest here that just as one segment of the filmgoing audience wanted relatively highbrow and experimental films like Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy, another group wanted lowbrow, cheap, exploitative movies like H.G. Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs or Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama.

What I’m pointing out is something actually fairly obvious: that despite Baumann’s triumphant description of the emergence of an art world for film in the 1960s, there was at the same time a very healthy schlock world for film that coexisted. What I would argue is that while highbrow audiences wanted highbrow films in the 60s, there was still a great demand for lowbrow films.

A comment Baumann makes later helps to explain the success of the 1950s or 1960s B movie. Again, it’s related to television. He explains Hollywood’s need to, again, give the audience something they couldn’t get from TV: “Hollywood needed to provide audiences with a rationale for choosing their product over television. Films needed to be sufficiently different so that their audiences had a reason for going out to theaters instead of what became the default option, staying in to watch television” (107). This point applies rather nicely to B movies, which almost by their very nature strive to offer audiences something they can’t get on TV. Exploitation pictures in general exploit sex or violence or else capitalize on a new trend. Roger Corman’s 1967 The Trip, for instance, was popular because LSD was all over the newspapers, having been criminalized in the previous year. This was, of course, a manner of content that couldn’t be seen on TV, and that’s much the case for most B movies, whether because they were too sexy, too bloody, or too edgy in terms of content.

My intervention here serves not to challenge Baumann or even to suggest that he’s “left something out.” Rather, I point to the success of B movies in order to illustrate that the great deal of changes that Baumann explains took place in the film industry during the 50s-60s created ripples that went in many different directions, some of which are within the scope of his project, and some of which aren’t. For instance, just as Bonnie and Clyde toyed with gangster-movie conventions and challenged the existing Code, Two Thousand Maniacs toyed with horror-film conventions and, because it was created by an independent director, evaded the code and was almost laughably bloody. The former’s much more notable today because it helped, presumably, legitimize the art world for Hollywood, but the latter, on close examination, is participating in similar processes and is swept up in the same exciting ebb and flow that took place in film during this era.

Why Sociologists don't make films.... and why I have to sound like a douche when talking about it

First, I feel the need to validate myself as a former student of film. Film has an important place in my academic life. And, though my undergraduate institution did not offer a film major, I overloaded my course work every semester to fit as many film courses as possible on top of my English courses, eventually having enough film course credits as would satisfy a double major. There are few areas of study I understand as well or better than film, so when I criticize "Hollywood Highbrow", I do it not out of a hatred of the text, but of a deep love of film.

The introduction is an interesting interpretation of the legitimizing path film studies/criticism has taken, if not without a few glaring errors. I understand the purpose of the book is not to act as a survey for introductory film courses, but I have a difficult time understanding how the text could be taught in any film course precisely because its lack of aesthetic analysis of the historically and sociologically changing interpretations of the VISUAL art of film, or close readings of seminal texts as examples and further proof of the arguments presented.

Andrew Sarris, maybe the most influential American film critic of the 1960s and 1970s called for a re-evaluation of American films. Contrary to what Baumann might have you believe about 'auteur theory' being imported from Europe and more specifically, France, it was not until Sarris' article "Notes on the Auteur Theory"(1962) and his subsequent book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 published in 1968, that the theory took hold in the states on a wider scale. Sarris called for films to be viewed using the three premises of auteur theory.... technique, personal style, and interior meaning. This was how a great deal of academic film criticism functioned up until the early 1980's. Baumann mentions Sarris only once, in his page on the shift from studio to director driven cinema. I was more than a little shocked to see him all but absent everywhere else in the text.

When Francois Truffaut wrote extensively on the theory in the mid 1950's it was a criticism of French post-war film, and not specifically targeted at Hollywood. To take it back even further, the supposed era in which Baumann suggests spawns the split of European and American taste in film and their later generations (namely the period between the wars) is precisely the time when the art and entertainment of film was perhaps at its most unified state. It was a time when both F.W. Murnau and Erich Von Stroheim (Among many other directors) immigrated to the U.S. and posted enormous box-office numbers with films that are highly regarded as some of the best films in History. ("Sunrise", and "Greed")

I could go on and on...

The point being, the book has some interesting graphs relating audience numbers, the shift in studio ownership of theaters, and the rising numbers of educated middle-class Americans... but what doesn't it have? A solid understanding of how film operates outside of numbers / or even how film criticism has and does function.

In analyzing part of Baumann's link between American Art film and European Art film and that European Art films altered the American perspective of the legitimacy of its own cinema... then I say... NO SHIT!?! Really? You mean the 400 Blows inspired a re-articulation of the coming of age story in American Film? You mean Italian Neo-Realism in the early 1950s made way for the socially conscious films of the late 1960's in America? You mean Claude Chabrol laid the blueprint in the late 60s and early 70s for what would in the 1980s be the American erotic thriller? You mean, profitable formulas are adopted and adapted to specific cultures in order to produce profit? Narrative and Visual forms are largely responsible for shifting audience tastes and aesthetics do play a significant role in the development of the industry AND the artform.

Basically, Baumann wants to have his cake and eat it too. He talks to directors about the creation of art, and then says that art only becomes so through the act of criticism by 'cultural experts', and only accepted by the public as art when it is processed through the filtering eye of the critic. The 'cultural experts' interpretation or reading is either accepted of rejected by the public.

For Baumann aesthetics are arbitrary. And he explains his perspective as “The book presents a sociological perspective, arguing that the coalescence of a novel perspective among a large group of people is a social process that lends itself more readily to sociological analysis than aesthetic analysis.”

I suppose that is why sociologists don't make films. They can't seem to figure out if the audience is making the art, or if the art is just good enough to create an audience.

Baumann jumps from topic to topic, citing sources and raising issues without fleshing them out or accurately connecting them to many specific, iconic films that support the claimed shifts in audience, profitability, and critical perspective.

It's interesting to see Green point to Chicago as the capital city of popular music. The case for a capital of popular music could easily be made for New York or even Memphis. Yet, Green maintains that Chicago has been the epicenter of popular music for more than a century. In “Making the Music” Green does provide a compelling case for why Chicago is and must be viewed as the capital of popular music.

Throughout the discussion found in the chapter I was impressed by Green's wide spanning knowledge and understanding of the music that emerged from Chicago before and after World War II. Green offers a view of American popular music that is not so readily apparent. Without question, the music made by African-American musicians in Chicago during this era has come to serve as the ground work for the majority of American popular music that has emerged in the last sixty years. While Green's analysis is compelling, I kept thinking about Chicago's emergent genres and how they were re-contextualized by other musicians and artists.

Green's discussion of Chicago blues is a particularly interesting case. Green notes how Chicago blues added a second guitar to most songs and amplification to the instrumentation. In regards to prior blues recordings this was something of a revolution. Green maintains that these musicians were entrepreneurs and were highly successful at the time. Yet, I wonder how many people reading the chapter are familiar with the artists he brings into the discussion. My suspicion is that the average reader may not be all that familiar with the majority of the artists. Yet, if one were to mention artists such as the Rolling Stones (in their early pre-psychedelic and post-Brian Jones periods), Janis Joplin, the Animals or Bob Dylan (in the years between 1965 and1966) the average individual would recognize these names. Almost twenty years after its inception the sound of Chicago blues was re-contextualized.

In stating this it is easy to assume that this is an argument along the lines of stating that an artists “stole the blues” (a case that can be leveled against Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin). Rather, it is an issue of re-contextualization in which the themes of urbanization and migration were stripped from the lyrical content of the music. Sonically, the music was more or less the same. Yet, the lyrical content had become cryptic and more surreal, particularly in the case of Bob Dylan. The argument could be made that the Rolling Stones did maintain the masculinity that Green points to as being ever present in Chicago Blues.

One can find another instance of this re-contextualization with Soul music. Mod culture and music in 1970s England is steeped Soul. Yet, Soul's roots in both gospel and blues cease to have any meaning within the Mod context. As with the blues, the themes of urbanization and migration are gone. Additionally, the social consciousness present in the lyrical content of Soul ceases to have any meaning Instead, Soul is a means of escapism, the back beat to an amphetamine fueled evening on the town.

Green and Ellison

I found Adam Green’s argument in Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 that the African-American migration from South to North, rural community to city (Chicago in particular) is directly linked to the rise in modernism fascinating, especially when viewed in context with Ralph Ellison’s writings. In Shadow and Act, Ellison describes “the Negro as a symbol of man.” For Ellison, African-American struggle and migration into Northern cities and their developing culture represented a shift in humanity as a whole and their struggles with the emergence of modernity. I really liked Green’s view of the city itself as the crux of this and how:

Globilized production, consumption, and investment, administration of planetary flows of people, seemingly universal mediascapes, all derive from the communities of scale cities offer…In a century where human life indisputably changed, one persistent universal has been the deepening orientation of social life toward urban rather than agrarian conditions. (4).

For Green, the city was modernity, and Ellison saw the African-American’s relationship to the city and their struggles adapting to it indicative of man’s struggle to adapt to modernity. The concept of the city as the face of the new world is not a new one. During the industrial revolution, when cities and urban populations boomed, the city represented both progress and societal decay. Drastic change in both society and culture was manifested through the growth of cities then, just as Green and Ellison viewed the city as indicative of America’s struggle with the emergence of modernity.

In Williams’s “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” he talks about alternative and oppositional ways of living, which I have always thought was interesting in comparison to Homi Bhabha’s ideas of ambivalence, hybridization, and agency through replication that he discusses in “Of Mimicry and Man.” While Williams talks about how alternative lifestyles can exist outside of dominant culture or as a way of living in direct—and often violent—opposition to that dominant culture, Bhabha discusses the possibility of agency by surpassing that dominant culture in their own way of life. When applied to analysis of minority groups, I often feel like African American resistance has fallen into the former, Williams region of sub/minority culture, and other subcultures, such as Asian Americans have become somewhat like Bhabha’s idea of the hybrid. When looking at it this way, it’s kind of interesting to consider qualities that are gained and lost through each group’s methods of adapting to, and fitting in with the dominant culture. I also think that it is something interesting to consider as we think of brow formation.

Asian Americans, often considered a “model minority” (a term first used in 1966 during the height of the Civil Rights movement) are often depicted favorably in mass culture. An example can be seen on the blog “Things White People Like:”

#11 Asian Girls: 95% of white males have at one point in their lives, experienced yellow fever. Many factors have contributed to this phenomenon such as guilt from head taxes, internment camps, dropping the Nuclear bomb and the Viet Nam War . This exchange works both ways as Asian girls have a tendency to go for white guys. (White girls never go for asian guys. Bruce Lee and Paul Kariya’s dad are the only recorded instances in modern history). Asian girls often to do this to get back at their strict traditional fathers. There is also the option of dating black guys, but they know deep down that this would give their non-english speaking grandmother(s) a heart attack.

White men love Asian women so much that they will go to extremes such as stating that Sandra Oh is sexy, teaching English in Asia, playing in a coed volleyball league, or attending institutions such as UBC or UCLA (please note that both schools’ colors of “blue” and “yellow” are intentional also the “A” in “UCLA” stand for “Asian” while the “B” in “UBC” stands for “Billion” try and figure out what the rest of the letters stand for). Another factor that draws white guys to Asian women is that white women are jealous of them.

Is it even necessary to unpack and discuss logic that airtight? Similar descriptions can be found on urbandictionary.com, and when we talk about the real hybrid of Asian and Caucasian culture, also known as the “hapa” culture, you see an even more fetishized image. The ability of Asian American culture to embody this aspect of the “not quite not white” has made them not only acceptable, but has also made them a type of status object--which, arguably, has challenged and altered the ways in which they interact with their cultural heritage and ideas of nationalism and identity.

But Green talks about the ways in which African American culture has been able to maintain aspects of its individuality even as it encounters and interacts with the dominant culture, and how that interaction has made it possible for them to be history and cultural producers as opposed to just victims. Overall, in looking at the two minority groups, it is interesting to see how each has navigated its own way with and through dominant culture, and to see in what capacity they are now allowed to intermingle and intermix (it wasn’t too long ago that a judge in Louisiana wouldn’t let an African American and white couple marry, stating: “I don’t do interracial marriages because I don’t want to put children in a situation they didn’t bring on themselves… I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way.) So, overall, I guess my question is: what does all of this mean for the minorities, both model and, well, not?

Thoughts on Guilbaut

I get what Serge Guilbaut is doing in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Context and ideology matter. I once took an art history class and it focused on descriptive styles and aesthetic histories devoid of political and ideological concepts. If I remember correctly, we were talking about the Hudson River School of painting and the importance “spiritual depth” in the landscapes. I was wondering instead, what events caused people to paint this way? Why was it so popular? Who bought it? Why do we study it today? If the class instead focused on these questions of cultural history and context, I would be probably be wondering why the landscapes are so expansive? Why are the people in the paintings so small? Why are all the colors muted and soft? I think it’s difficult to willfully separate these two sets of questions into these constant oppositional camps. A work of art inspires curiosity on multiple levels. The form of creation and the material circumstances influencing the form generates greater knowledge.

Guilbaut is absolutely right in emphasizing the importance of the complicated cultural tensions of the 30’s and 40’s that gave rise to the movement of the avant-garde into Arthur Schlesinger’s heroic Vital Center. But the manner in which he arrogantly dismisses all the prior scholarship done on Modern Art and his bravado in declaring that he’ll “shrug off” future critiques of his work makes me cringe. “This has to do with resistance to the idea of dragging art’s ideal values through the mud of politics and ideology. This is an objection that I merely shrug off, for I am convinced that, while such treatment may somewhat dim art’s ethereal luster, this loss will be more than compensated by the gain in reality and truth” (12). The way he frames the debate by caricaturing the other side and the near animosity he has for his opposition is off-putting and makes him less credible, even if his position is unique. I don’t see why aesthetics and politics cannot work hand in hand to gain a broadly textured understanding of Modern Art, or other movements in art history.

Matt Nelson

Abstract Expressionism= Cultural Production in Times of Chaos

“In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. And that mind is alone felt to be trustworthy which most resembles this reality by most nearly reproducing the sensation it affords.” Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination

Guilbaut’s discussion of abstract expressionism in the first chapter of his text encouraged me to look at abstract expressionism as being difficult to interpret yet still bearing semblance to the period in which it was produced, making it an art form that should not be lambasted for being “inaccessible.”Guilbaut writes, “But if Schapiro was right and abstract art was rooted in the social fabric, responding to social conflicts and contradictions, then it was theoretically possible for a left-wing artist to use abstraction (and thus to take advantage of twentieth-century discoveries in the plastic arts) without being ashamed of it” (Guilbaut 25). Following a materialist conception of art, we can see abstract expressionism emerging from the chaos and conflict that resulted from the political, economic, and social events following World War II.

In addition, the above quote by Trilling fits in perfectly with Schapiro’s argument because although modern painters may not have been depicting reality directly, their work embodied the sensations of reality, or the feelings and emotions that are identified with that period of time. In the case of abstract expressionist art, artists such as Jackson Pollack attempted to create art that embodied the essence of the period after World War II, and although many may not have been able to interpret this kind of art, I think what makes Pollack’s art somewhat accessible to me is that it is a reflection of the struggle people faced in coming to terms with modernization by realizing that they were both its subjects and objects.

Just like Americans were trying to come to grips with this modernity in their lives, artists such as Pollack were coming to grips with modernity in their artwork. In this case we see Pollack and other abstract expressionist artists embracing chaos, fragmentation, and destruction rather than fleeing from it. In all actuality, then, abstract expressionists were not really out of touch with their environment but were bold enough to confront it in all of its complexities and intricacies. It is this revelation that has led to my newfound appreciation of this type of art form.

Glee = Fascism? WWHW? "What would Hitler Watch?"

New York didn't only “Steal” the idea of modern art, but also became a refuge for the modern condition in light of the Fascist appropriation of the classical forms. As many of us already know, Hitler was an unsuccessful artist who was denied admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He thought of himself as a connoisseur of the arts and when he became head of the Third Reich, he enforced his aesthetic ideal on the nation. The type of art that was favored among Hitler and the Nazi party were classical portraits and landscapes by old masters, particularly those of Germanic origin. Modern art that did not match this was dubbed degenerate art (entartete Kunst in German) by the Third Reich. The art of Jewish and eastern European artists deemed degenerate was often displayed in highly controlled exhibitions designed to discredit their pieces and call attention to the grotesqueness of the modern condition perpetrated by those ethnic groups.

Throughout the War, Hitler made the looting of important pieces (both classical and 'degenerate')and appropriation of art tantamount. To control art is to control consciousness. Hitler, as well as Mussolini and Franco all understood this; adopting important directors in to the fold to direct propaganda films, writers to write, and artists to create art that supports their ideology. The rest either fled Europe, hid, or committed suicide. It's precisely because the Avant Garde was not easily accessible that it could not be rightly appropriated.

The fears of a Fascist Europe introducing a new Dark Age were not totally founded. Rather, a fear of a Fascist Europe in which Art serves the state and serves the lowest forms (for lack of a better term) of artistic representation. Art that is good if 'the art looks like the thing it's supposed to look like.'

Is there something dangerous in mediocrity? Is there something about accessibility that actually acts in a counter democratic way?

In a sad twist of events, some 100,00 pieces of art that were plundered by the Nazi's were never found, including a number of important pieces. It does seem unfortunate and fitting that Fascism consumed and destroyed the very thing it attempted to reposition.

art and antifascism

Towards the end of the 1930's, Brecht shocked the guests at a New York party by claiming, about the accused in the Moscow show trials: "The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot." This statement is to be taken quite seriously, not just as perverse cockiness: its underlying premise is that in a concrete historical struggle, the attitude of "innocence" ("I don't want to dirty my hands by getting involved in the struggle, I just want to lead a modest and honest life") embodies the ultimate guilt. In our world, doing nothing is not empty, it already has a meaning - it means saying "yes" to existing relations of domination.

-Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates: Zizek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings (Verso, 2002)

Guilbot's comment in the introduction about providing a materialist history of modern art by examining the role of the art markets themselves worried me. What about the very real material violence on which the market rests? or the active (and passive violence) which makes the market itself possible and safe enough that it can be spoken of and critiqued publicly? Guilbot's first chapter on the communist debates over art and culture alleviated my concern. By addressing the overt political implications of cultural production, this chapter opened up many questions: particularly the consequences of modernity as the differentiation of life into separate spheres, but also the radical insistence that one cannot occupy a "pure" sphere as the idea of purity will always obscure its dirty and compromised conditions of possibility. Instead of theory, I'll relate an experience.

In 2005 my band was set to play in Bratislava, Slovakia. We were informed a week before hand that our promoter there had been jumped outside his apt and stabbed repeatedly. He and other prominent figures in the Bratislava hardcore/punk scene (people who booked shows, ran labels, put out zines) were being targeted by local fascists. Grassroots fascism has been on the rise in Eastern and Southern Europe with members of extremist groups joining police and local governments. Many involved in the punk scene are active in anti-fascist organizing which keeps track of groups and individuals, making their affiliations known whenever one of them tries to run for office. As a result, in Bratislava shows had been getting raided by gangs of skinheads/hooligans, there were bomb threats, and now orchestrated attempts on peoples' lives.

When the promoter was out of the hospital we offered to cancel the show. As an openly anarchist band we did not want to be responsible for agitating an already delicate situation. He told us they hadn't had shows for 6 months because of the threat of violence and that we needed to play, if for no other reason than to demonstrate (possibly only to themselves) that they could not be intimidated. The day before our show the singer of a local band was stabbed; he had both his lungs punctured and one collapsed. The night we played nobody knew if he was going to live (he did). Over 200 people came out to the show. The bands played knowing full well what might happen. There were scouts in the surrounding neighborhoods on the lookout for gangs and two ex-yugoslav military guys at the door (strapped). Thankfully, nothing happened.

In that situation I remember thinking that our music had ceased to be something which we ourselves made and it became something that was possible only as part of a collective refusal. It left no room to be neutral and even affirmed the use of violence to ensure its stability (guards). I read the debates over the Popular Front in this context. Trotsky's comment that "art cannot save itself" especially resonated. That night in Bratislava an anti-fascist community required art in order to save itself.

An Americanization of Modern Art?

I agree with Guilbaut’s claim that one of the reasons why American after war avant-garde’s taking the abstract form, is that the artists were pursuing a depoliticization style equally aloof from the right and the left. He elaborates it in the second chapter:
They used these elements (Trotskyism, surrealism and other movements) to establish a theoretical justification of their own position, with which they could respond to the new social situation. If they deformed the texts from which they borrowed, the reason was not that they failed to understand them, but rather that they were sick of politics and therefore thought they were sick of history as well. By using primitive imagery and myths to cut themselves off from the historical reality of their own time, they hope to protect themselves from the manipulation and disillusionment they had suffered previously. (77)

Though from a different standpoint, Adorno had a similar claim in his Aesthetic Theory. For him, modern art resists the administered art and the self-evidence of empirical reality. He praised writer Samuel Beckett, whose difficult works he viewed as specific responses to the historical and social conditions of modernity.:”Beckett's oeuvre gives the frightful answer to art that, by its starting point, by its distance from any praxis, art in the face of mortal threat becomes ideology through the harmlessness of its mere form, regardless of its content.” (Aesthetic Theory 250)
To some extent, the creation of Beckett and the French New Novel can be seen as a parallel movement to abstract expressionism in Paris in the field of literature. Beckett went through WWII in Paris and joined the French Resistance in 1940. He started to write in French in 1946. His works and the New Novel in the 1950s are also considered as avant-garde, and featured by experimental styles which were diverged from classical literary genres—like abstract expressionism, they switched from the traditional realism to an avant-garde manner that mainly deal with the form and genre.

This comparison makes me to think whether it is valid to say New York stole the idea of modern art from Paris. Or Guilbaut’s work on American abstract expressionism is just a situation-specific account on the modern art from a broader cross-country phenomenon. (the broader tradition might be suggested by MOMA’s first director Alfred Barr’s diagram on the development of modern art) I tried to look for his expound on some distinguishing features of the works of abstract expressionism that only speak to the American background. However, Guilbaut goes on too much about the political details in the whole book, while for the art works and artists themselves, he mentioned nothing more than “using primitive imagery and myths” and did not elaborate.

To say “the fall of Paris” in the cultural aspect might be a little assertive. Think about the literary scene at that time in France. Perhaps it’s merely the fact that art creation is more likely to be affected with the market than literary creation does. The establishment of Museum of Modern Art relied on the director Alfred Barr’s idea not so much as the Rockefeller’s money. For me, the Americanization of modern art described in this book has a lot more to do with government’s financing and organizing the art movement.