Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Jameson (1988) argues that postmodernism was born out of
Postmodernism in the 1960s 183
the shift from an oppositional to a hegemonic position of the classics of modernism,
the latter’s conquest of the university, the museum, the art gallery network
and the foundations, the assimilation . . . of the various high modernisms, into the
‘canon’ and the subsequent attenuation of everything in them felt by our grandparents
to be shocking, scandalous, ugly, dissonant, immoral and antisocial (299).
For the student of popular culture perhaps the most important consequence of the
new sensibility, with its abandonment of ‘the Matthew Arnold notion of culture,
finding it historically and humanly obsolescent’ (Sontag, 1966: 299), is its claim that
‘the distinction between “high” and “low” culture seems less and less meaningful’ (302).
In this sense, it is a sensibility in revolt against what is seen as the cultural elitism of
modernism. Modernism, in spite of the fact that it often quoted from popular culture,
is marked by a deep suspicion of all things popular. Its entry into the museum and the
academy was undoubtedly made easier (regardless of its declared antagonism to ‘bourgeois
philistinism’) by its appeal to, and homologous relationship with, the elitism of
class society. The postmodernism of the late 1950s and 1960s was therefore in part a
populist attack on the elitism of modernism. It signalled a refusal of what Andreas
Huyssen (1986) calls ‘the great divide . . . [a] discourse which insists on the categorical
distinction between high art and mass culture’ (viii). Moreover, according to Huyssen,
‘To a large extent, it is by the distance we have travelled from this “great divide”
between mass culture and modernism that we can measure our own cultural postmodernity’
(57).
The American and British pop art of the 1950s and 1960s presented a clear rejection
of the ‘great divide’. It rejected Arnold’s definition of culture as ‘the best that has been
thought and said’ (see Chapter 2), preferring instead Williams’s social definition of
culture as ‘a whole way of life’ (see Chapter 3). British pop art dreamed of America
(seen as the home of popular culture) from the grey deprivation of 1950s Britain. As
Lawrence Alloway, the movement’s first theorist, explains,
The area of contact was mass produced urban culture: movies, advertising, science
fiction, pop music. We felt none of the dislike of commercial culture standard
among most intellectuals, but accepted it as a fact, discussed it in detail, and consumed
it enthusiastically. One result of our discussions was to take Pop culture out
of the realm of ‘escapism’, ‘sheer entertainment’, ‘relaxation’, and to treat it with
the seriousness of art (quoted in Frith and Horne, 1987: 104).
Andy Warhol was also a key figure in the theorizing of pop art. Like Alloway, he
refuses to take seriously the distinction between commercial and non-commercial art.
He sees ‘commercial art as real art and real art as commercial art’ (109). He claims that
‘“real” art is defined simply by the taste (and wealth) of the ruling class of the period.
This implies not only that commercial art is just as good as “real” art – its value simply
being defined by other social groups, other patterns of expenditure’ (ibid.). We can