No, it is not like any other love: This love is different because it’s ours.
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."
YAAAARRRR!!!!
This is the battle I wage in my day to day life. How do I get “you,” the elitist academy, to recognize “me,” the academic who wants to know what makes “us”–the American people–who “we” are. For example, last year, I wrote an essay about the way teen television, specifically Dawson’s Creek and My So-Called Life, represent teen male homosexuals. I looked at spectatorship and reception, and examined studies of young gay men who, feeling that they had no access to queer culture, used television to learn about and understand what it meant to be young and queer. I looked at the way those characters were constructed within the context of the programs and the relational dialectics used to discuss developing sexuality, queer and not. And when I talked to my peers, they giggled.
They weren’t giggling because I was writing about queerness, but because in their eyes, the paper was about Dawson’s Creek, a teen soap opera. They didn’t really care about what the paper was about, what kind of claims I was making, what questions I was asking, or what kind of conclusions I was drawing, but that I was writing “about” a teen soap opera.
And yet, if I were writing about, say, the queer undertones in Hemingway’s work or studying the lyrics of Smiths songs vis a vis the romantic relationship between Stephen Morrissey and Johnny Marr (that is, the love you kicked off this post writing about), no one would have laughed, except perhaps because I was so feeble an academic as to bring that old crap out again.
My point is this: popular culture is worth studying. What is important, however, is that the academy recognize that studying popular culture (and its siamese twin mass culture) is not a cop-out of looking at fluff. It is, in a lot of ways, looking at the largest part of our culture to see why we have embraced it. If we are to understand who “we” are, it is important not only to examine the so-called great works of literature–the ones most people read because some high school teacher or college professor forces them to–but at the popular works that might tell us something about who we are today!
Comment by Ellen — 07 September, 2006 @ 6:54 pm
YEEEAAAARRRRRHHHHH!
This is the struggle I face every time I interact with the academic world. How do I make “you,” the elitist academic, recognize “me,” an academic with an interest in popular culture and its siamese twin mass culture?
Last year I wrote an essay about how teen television depicts queer teen males. I used Dawson’s Creek and My So-Called Life as examples, as they are the only television programs that have had regular gay male characters. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the only other program to have had regular gay teens–a pair of lesbians.) I looked at spectatorship, citing examples from multiple studies that have shown that, prior to coming out, the vast majority of queer suburban teenage males feel they have no point of access to queer culture, and therefore learn about “how” to be gay from media, specifically television. I looked at issues of sexuality, gender identity and ethnicity. I examined relational dialectics and how sexuality, queer or otherwise, is represented in non-sexual relations between characters.
You know what my peers said? They laughed. To them, I wrote an essay about a teen soap. They didn’t care what I had written, what issues I was raising, what questions I was asking, or what spaces I might be opening.
If I had written the essay about queer themes in Hemmingway, that would have been acceptable. I could possibly have gotten away with writing about queer lyrics in Smiths songs, like the one your post started with, and how the relationship between Stephen Morrissey and Johnny Marr affected the music and gotten away with it–but barely. But an essay that involves some close reading of a teen drama? Sorry, we have some lovely parting gifts.
From where I see it, if we want to study culture, even from an academic standpoint, to ignore popular culture provides a myopic view of what culture is. Popular culture is who we are, here on the ground, and that’s what makes it worth coming down from the ivory tower for.
Comment by Ellen — 07 September, 2006 @ 8:31 pm