Pop Goes the Culture

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Pop is easy listening, easy watching, easy thinking. Yet it is also authentically democratic. Unlike serious painting or dance or poetry, the appreciation of popular culture requires no tutelage or special sensibility, not even close attention. Florenz Ziegfeld and George Lucas create art that is one-size-fits-all. Except perhaps for Roman Catholicism, no other Western cultural genus has been as inclusive as modern pop, so truly classless. Indeed, says Fiedler, Nikes and Garfield T shirts are class camouflage. "One of the functions of pop culture," Fiedler says, "is to make it impossible to spot where a person belongs on the social hierarchy by what he's wearing, what he's drinking, what he's watching on TV."

That great leveling effect, however, has not made pop any more palatable to old-line intellectuals. The contempt was, until rather recently, obligatory and absolute. Mandarin ill will reached a peak in "Masscult & Midcult," Dwight Macdonald's acutely cranky 1960 essay. "Masscult is bad in a new way," he wrote, because "it doesn't even have the theoretical possibility of being good." A pernicious "Gresham's law" was inevitable: good art would be driven out by the bad -- by pop. Another ferocious holdout is William Gass, a very intelligent critic whose opaque, self-conscious novels are the sort of fiction that drives literate people toward Judith Krantz. "This muck cripples consciousness," he proclaimed of pop in 1968. "Therefore no concessions should be made to it." Sorry. Concessions were made. "By the late 1960s," writes Princeton Scholar Louis Menand, "popular culture had permeated every aspect of life with an inexorability that was beyond the powers of any sort of intellectual antagonism to resist."

Some intellectuals did not even put up a fight. The Popular Culture Association, founded in 1969, now has 3,000 members. At Bowling Green State University, apparently the one college with a department devoted to the subject, 22 students are currently pursuing degrees in pop. (An undergraduate's dream: degree credit for watching Gilligan's Island reruns and reading R. Crumb.) Unfortunately, the pop academy's insights often seem to have the depth and complexity of pop itself.

The problem is their earnestness in pursuit of pop. More interesting and significant was the neo-Dada embrace of pop by artists and independent intellectuals of the 1950s and early '60s. Their approach was off-center, cool in every sense. In Andy Warhol's first shows, in 1962, he exhibited enormous paintings of Coke bottles and Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. The subject was pop, but determinedly devoid of high-culture anger. Roy Lichtenstein's jumbo cartoon-panel paintings, complete with mawkish dialogue fragments and ersatz Benday dots, were jollier expressions of the same idea.

The epicene urban subculture, Susan Sontag explained in "Notes on 'Camp,' " her remarkably astute 1964 essay, was reveling in the "great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement . . . The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure." Kitsch is amusing, not threatening. An ironic acceptance of pop effluvia, Sontag wrote, "makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated." Sontag's hip intellectuals did not like cheap science-fiction movies or Fabian: they "liked" them.