The Lively Arts (review)

Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. Michael Kammen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 495. $35.00.

I suspect that nearly every reader of this journal will know Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," will be familiar with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's critique of mass culture, will have read at least a smattering of Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall on popular culture, and will know something of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Yet I would wager that very few readers will know who Gilbert Seldes was, and fewer still will be able to cite his accomplishments with any specificity. Such a state of affairs is peculiar in light of the pervasive influence in the academy of cultural studies, a multifaceted field meant to deepen our understanding of the cultural life of ordinary people. How is it that this burgeoning field has systematically ignored a major forerunner, a man who for fifty years--from the early 1920s to the late 1960s--sustained as high a level of intelligent discussion and contributed as much to our understanding of the public arts as any other critic in this country or abroad?

Gilbert Seldes was born in 1893 in Alliance, New Jersey, grew up in a utopian farm community, and attended Harvard. During a long and distinguished career that ended with his death in 1970 this remarkably versatile cultural critic wrote a series of influential books on popular culture, including The 7 Lively Arts (1924), An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies (1929), Mainland (1936), The Movies Come from America (1937), Your Money and Your Life: A Manual for "The Middle Classes" (1938), The Great Audience (1950), The Public Arts (1956), and The New Mass Media (1957). Seldes was a multimedia critic whose insights derived from a good deal of hands-on experience. He wrote and produced plays and prize-winning documentaries, he wrote program notes for Carnegie Hall jazz concerts, he did numerous radio spots and television programs (including an unusual appearance as a critic on "The Jack Benny Show"), he was the first director of television for CBS, and he was the first dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Seldes edited The Dial as well as other publications, and wrote hundreds of essays, columns, and reviews for magazines as diverse as Vanity Fair, The Freeman, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, and TV Guide on an astonishing range of subjects, including film, dance, radio, television, industrial design, and advertising. His concerns were equally varied, for they took in the growth of mass culture, the aesthetic and social effects of the media and the arts, their relation to capital and commerce, the stratification of audience and taste, the relations between "highbrow" and "lowbrow," and government regulation and subsidization of the arts.

Although little of Seldes's work remains in print, fortunately we now have Michael Kammen's reliable and judicious account of his career to revive interest in that work. Kammen shows how Seldes assiduously avoided the highbrow rejection of mass culture, which he considered elitist, snobbish, and even hypocritical given the highbrow embrace of second-rate "serious" culture and secret enjoyment of "low" culture. At the same time Seldes rebuked the populists and apologists for inferior fare for their naïveté and cynicism. Kammen argues that Seldes's own position was a complicated one: as a public intellectual he wished to assist as many citizens as possible to develop their critical skills, raise their expectations, and thereby present the producers of mass culture with a powerful force in favor of diversity, dynamism, and innovation. He was equally pleased to share his enthusiasm with his vast audience--for Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, Krazy Kat, jazz, Disney--and his dislike for what he considered banal and predictable. As a mentor to the public and an advocate for taste, he attempted to democratize...