What is it?
Culture is the distilled truth of organic existence over the whole of time. In order that this truth is perpetuated it has to be continually renewed through change and development. Culture acts as a kind of yeast in the bread of civilisation. It makes rise those major shifts in human relationships by which we arrange our affairs and hold a view of ourselves. In this respect culture will often cause civilisations to sink and in the process create a crisis for those institutions that govern and regulate the manner in which we act and think. Civilisations are like fertile lands that eventually become arid because the rivers dry up. New springs begin to irrigate the soil as the river of culture runs through them once more. Sometimes the rivers form lakes that turn into fetid swamps but where a powerful current is flowing, the rivers start to flow strongly again until they find an outlet to join the great, eternal oceans of truth.
Civilisations may thrive for a time beyond their sell-by-date but a culture based on the truth of experience will not allow them to last for long. The period between a civilised society’s menopause and the pregnancy of a new one in the making can be very painful, confusing and misleading. Where culture and civilisation go along arm in arm, artists are often content to cohabitate, the best and most mature art flourishing in such circumstances. Where there is uncertainty and conflict about the state of art, the artists become subversive, throwing their critics into disarray. Without art, culture remains primitive, but without a sustaining civilisation artists cannot properly operate.
The poet, T S Eliot, describes culture as “a whole way of life” and that is so. Art is in the vanguard of culture and particularly of cultural change but I believe it quite wrong to deify the artist or to put him apart as someone different from the rest of us. Artists are like servants in the big house, or palace, of a powerful ruler. They don’t own it, they don’t give the orders and they have no control over the finances that pay their wages but without them the whole edifice would collapse. The creation of original artefact is what the artist does and, therefore, falls within the compass of anyone from the carpenter to the sculptor. Civilisation is a kind of large vat that stores all the cultural ingredients necessary for viable human interaction within the family, the community and any kind of unified society, but is not the same as culture.
What does it do?
Art may be the highest expression of culture but is still its derivative and not the complete thing. The two great creative periods of modern, western history, the Renaissance and The Enlightenment, would not have brought forth beautiful paintings, sculpture, music and literature without huge steps forward in the advances of science and technology. The corresponding factors, i.e. in the economic, social, political and topographical field, accompanying such advances, effect fundamental cultural alterations in the way people work and live, and always involve losses as well as gains. In this context, the artist presents a creative sensibility of a personal kind that, if it is to be of any worth, will reflect what many others know, think and feel not only in the present but will have done so basically in the past and will be repeated in the future. Indeed, the singular function of culture is to repeat in new forms what has already been created by former civilisations and this inevitably means creating great art. A society and its citizens which claim to celebrate the great art of the past but fail to produce anything comparable, then that society and its people can be said not to have properly understood and absorbed the art of the past.
The paradox that every generation and individual faces is the singular and finite nature of existence, which eventually causes to be addressed three basic questions:
1. Is life worth living?
2. Does it amount to very much?
3. Will it continue?
The artist’s answers, to satisfy himself and others fully, have to be primarily aesthetic insofar as it is his task to produce a beautiful work of art, but his understanding of reality has to extend far beyond that. Although the creative act is essentially an individual one, the true artist loses his individuality in the process (in the past he did this usually by being relatively obscure in his day or by dying young), thus allowing his art to be shared communally. Any attempt to make a culture out of syndicated activity will inevitably fail. The only animal corporate art can produce is a stuffed one, not a living creature. This is a problem for a democracy as Alexis de Toqueville noted during his sojourn across America in 1831-32.
In an oligarchy, high culture is largely determined by a few who have most of the wealth and, of course, all the political power. If they lack within their own ranks sufficient numbers of gifted people – they rarely do have enough – they can usually bring on board, through patronage and favour, the best creative minds. In a democracy, Toqueville argued, people can act collectively to improve radically their living conditions but it then become a much harder task for them to maintain the best of culture because the tastes of the majority will often flood the scene, making it difficult for individuals swimming against the tide to stay afloat. It was most perceptive of this French aristocrat to identify so early on and in the USA, the greatest democracy of modern times, the essential problem facing mass civilisation: the conflict between immediate satisfactions and the more enduring values, often demanding sacrifices, which have persisted since time began.
Moreover, we appear to have become considerably more confused about how to relate the past and the present within a uniform cultural context. Such terms as lowbrow, highbrow, classical and modern, popular art and other kinds of art have been on the go for most of the past two centuries yet were unheard of in earlier periods of history. For example, if we could go back in time and ask a visitor to the Globe Theatre in sixteenth-century London into which of these categories he might cast himself, utter bewilderment would ensue. In the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare much folklore and vulgarity have been incorporated, which reflect a culturally organic view of society. Somehow or other, culture later became hijacked by the rising middle classes. In the nineteenth century, the common people are practically lost sight of in the literature of the day, apart from some notable exceptions, like Dickens. In fact, it wasn’t until it began to disappear, that people became conscious that even such a thing as folk art existed.
Who has it?
The cultural dominance of the United States in modern times has fundamentally altered the balance between the tastes of the many and those of the few. In that country, particularly in the twentieth century, not only did the art of the common man flourish but all art, de facto, aspires to be popular art. This has created problems for those wishing to preserve the best of past, elitist cultures, while making them presentable to great numbers. Vast improvements in living conditions, paralleled with a public education system open to all, up to and including university training, not to underestimate the free access to art galleries and museums, have done much to enhance understanding of the achievements in painting, sculpture, music and literature inherited from older and very different civilisations. Possibly more importantly, many American artists have succeeded in bridging the gap between the “classical” and the “popular”. In music, Leonard Bernstein immediately comes to mind while other composers, writers, film directors and painters have made their mark not only in the USA but also world wide.
Those who had the say so in the more class bound and caste systems, markedly in Europe, were much slower in embracing popular art forms, or what may justly be called the phenomenon of an urban folk culture created within a highly industrialised society and high density living. In Britain, for example, the music of Ira Gershwin, never mind mainstream jazz, took a long time to become accepted as a regular feature of classical music programmes broadcast by the BBC, including the Promenade Concerts. For years, the cultural impact of cinema was simply ignored by both academia and the intelligentsia and like pop music, also hugely enjoyed by many, never became “established” until the 1960s – films favourably reviewed in the posh Sunday papers were nearly always from Europe or what we now call art-house movies. Once bands like The Beatles were accepted right across the USA it became clear that Britain had at last signed up fully to the democratic club. Other landmarks in the 1960s, like the Lady Chatterley Trial at the Old Bailey, were also key occasions in a quite significant cultural re-ordering of values that would have all kinds of implications not only for art but for the general social life as well.
What is significant in the west, more so in Europe than in America, is the loss of direction and confidence of those established authorities that previously ministered the cultural life of society, cant phrases like multicultural, world music and pluralistic values predominating. Everywhere, in broadcasting, in publishing, in newspapers, there is division, insecurity and uncertainty, epitomised by a failed sense of what is good, worthwhile and valuable to preserve. Instead there is a constant clamour for success to show its face and reveal its secrets for all to embrace. Often, the criteria for this success depend primarily on wealth, fame and notoriety. In the USA this has not been quite such a problem as it has for European countries where cultural values have traditionally been determined top down rather than bottom up. In the States, because it is such a rich society, some have managed to buck the trend, individual voices rising above the din of publicity and contributing uniquely to the cultural scene. Very importantly for the creative field, the growing sense of confidence in their living standards and way of life, which characterised America for most of the twentieth century and still persists today, though less strongly, has been utterly crucial for artists. A reversal of fortunes in Europe has had the very opposite affect, often resulting in a vulgarisation of what was once considered to be the best alongside an elevation of the tawdry to absurd levels of esteem.
Who wants it?
The conscious basis of significant art stems from its capacity to be aware of everything that is going on around its creation. In this, the trivial and the inconsequential will inevitably vie with the serious and the solemn, both sides capable of vitality. A viable culture is always broadly comprehensive where it expresses the social variety that constitutes real living experience. In this regard, the emergence of popular art in democratic societies is a healthy thing. It is less healthy, however, if the scene becomes fragmented so that the idea of excellence is either ignored or becomes hived off into selective areas. To a certain extent, this has already happened in music. For example, in modern classical music many of its outstanding practitioners have their bases in universities and, indeed, find the bulk of their audiences within the same cloisters. Retreat – and that’s essentially what a university represents – might be comforting to those seeking seclusion and rarity but can never replace the world in which most of us are compelled to live. The itemisation of culture as an academic phenomenon has reached out to pop art, a subject for study in many colleges and universities in the USA and Britain.
A culture with a future has to be a unique blend of belonging and survival that can be shared by the great majority. Storytellers, poets and musicians most importantly, are rightly esteemed by those who value and understand the importance of creativity in the life of everyone. At the same time, it behoves everyone to try and speak intelligently about what it is that renders art significantly in establishing enduring human values. A great deal of popular art represents a distraction from what is actually going on in people’s lives and is often sentimental, simplistic, brutally sensational and even meretricious. Perhaps large segments of popular entertainment, especially television, do little more than make people become somnolent and half comatose. It is when we are woken up that we should take note and try to explain what pleases us.
I have always loved films in a kind of ambivalent way. It’s story telling I enjoy most but in the end I find literature much more satisfying. It continues to confound me that film appears so far to have failed to produce the masterpieces that can compare, or stand their ground alongside great novels, say. Even the very best of films will not, in my view, endure for generations to come in the way that we continue to celebrate the works of great dramatists, poets and novelists of the past. Because cinema is very much the quintessential art product of democratic development, in certain respects our judgement of it is tantamount to a judgement of the cultural quality of modern life itself. Painting and sculpture, for example, attracted the likes of Michelangelo and Leonard da Vinci in Renaissance Italy, dramatists like Shakespeare in sixteenth century England, novelists like Dickens and Tolstoy in the nineteenth century. Where are their likes in cinema? The story of popular art is far from over, however, and perhaps it is conceivable that the great artistic achievements of the past will be repeated in the present. Some terrifically entertaining films have been produced, without doubt. I have chosen to examine one, which I consider to be among the best, the 1970s Hollywood film The Sting.
To view discussion of the film, The Sting and other articles on cinema go to http://www.avventura-press.co.uk/culture.htm
