Something from Owen Gleiberman, one of the two regular film critics for Entertainment Weekly magazine:
In 1989, I attended the Andy Warhol retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and within a short time — it might have been 15 minutes — I saw the light. Like a lot of people, I’d walked in thinking that Warhol’s art was submerged in irony — that it was a joke, a lark, a candy-colored postmodern ‘’statement.'’ Yet as I strolled through the galleries, staring at the Campbell’s soup cans, which seemed to vibrate in their starkly wholesome repetitive banality; at the Marilyns, which weren’t just psychedelic, they were phosphorescent; at the images of death and disaster, a silk-screen vision of American tabloid hell…as I wandered through it all, I saw only one thing, and that was beauty. Yes, these paintings said, behold the godlessness of our bright, plasticine, fame-fixated, factory world. But then see that these images are anything but godless, because they are our world. Why can’t a soup can be a sublime still life? (Is an apple more glorious?) Or a Marilyn our Madonna? Don’t just see the artifice, declared Warhol. See the light!
This is from a review of a new documentary on Warhol and his work.
I wanted to add this as sort of a springboard onto some random jottings about a variety of subjects. To whit:
The Gleiberman excerpt sort of suggests a manifesto for those of us (we know who we are) who are interested in pop culture and pop iconography. Warhol’s "soup can" prints, while ostensibly themselves a commentary on pop icons, have now sort of become iconographic themselves, a sort of visual shorthand that suggests a certain way of thinking about art and the icon (both in a sacred and secular mode). I think, too, that the Gleiberman piece implies that since we do live surrounded (suffocated?) by Pop culture, that it is worthy of serious study.
If popcult is worthy of study, what does this mean about the future of the academy? Pop culture, is–almost by definition–democratic in form and function, while the very idea of the academy seems. . .well, I hesitate to say elitist, but let’s admit that it is somewhat less than egalitarian. If pop culture becomes increasingly part of our curricula, how will the academy adapt? I’m not being very clear on this, I know. Let me breakdown my various thoughts, unorganized and shapeless though they may be:
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There are some texts that seemed destined to remain a part of the academy with little chance of them ever becoming embedded in pop culture. Let’s take my favorite such bugaboo, Proust’s A Remembrance of Things Past, as our example. Does anyone read this thing anymore outside of the academy? (I’m sure some do, but not many I imagine.) Even if people do, they are a minority and the book nevertheless has a reputation for difficulty and obliqueness that probably frightens away anything less than a scholarly inclined audience.
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It is this difficulty which seems to earn the book its reputation as an unrivalled masterpiece of literature; therefore, the academy is thus postulated as an institution devoted to the study of arduous works of art that are beyond the ken of the layman. These texts, in turn, are dismissed by a lay audience who has been told these books are beyond their faculties.
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Here’s where my thinking gets a little fuzzy. When the academy then, starts studying popcult, do we raise the perceived value of pop texts or diminish the perceived value of traditionally "academic" texts? Which is to ask: If I write my dissertation on Al Bundy, does that mean Married. . .With Children is as good as Remembrance of Things Past? I realize that I’m sort of struggling with a (perhaps) outmoded assumption, namely, that there are texts "worth studying" and texts "not worth studying."
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I understand the current assumption is that all cultural artifacts, from Proust to Bundy, are worth studying precisely for what they can demonstrate about their audience and the question of how the texts/artifacts are absorbed and distributed throughout a culture. Nevertheless, if the academy used to be an institution that sought to answer the question: What texts are worth studying?, that question seems now to shift to Why are texts worth studying? Which, given the academy’s purpose to generate and distribute new knowledge, seems to open the door to the question: Why is the institutionalized academy the only body given the accepted purview to examine texts in this fashion?
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This all ties into questions of the ever-shifting canon, as well. Every body of study has its canon, I know, but do we need canon, if what I might call intellectual relativism seems to imply that any text is worthy of study, regardless of its own virtues or (perceived) lack thereof?
I don’t have the answers, I just thought up the questions.
By the way, the title of this post is taken from the Smiths’ song "Hand in Glove."
