- The Depth of Shallow Culture: The High Art of Shoes, Movies, Novels, Monsters, and Toys
Those of us who study popular culture are sometimes defensive about our work. After all, we are not splitting atoms, curing cancer, or eradicating domestic violence. Indeed, we can easily imagine that we address a reader prone to dismiss our interests as frivolous and trifling. We typically try to alleviate this anxiety in one of two ways. Either we assert that popular culture is valuable and intelligible on its own grounds (rendering problematic the issue of why it then needs to be elucidated by obscure academic discourse) or we argue that there is no real difference between so-called high and popular culture (rendering problematic the continued use of the terms as analytically distinct and useful concepts for social science). At first glance, Bergesen seems to fall into the latter trap. As his title indicates, his project is to show the “often unseen depth” (p. 6) of the popular — i.e., the essential sameness of the popular and the elite.
But from the opening page, Bergesen makes it clear that he is not arguing that the popular American (and some Japanese) cultural objects that he will consider (sneakers, movies, monsters, and toys) are wholly coequal with objects typically classified within the category of high culture. He argues that these “shallow” objects are clearly designed for a lowest-common-denominator, mass-consuming public. Moreover, he tells us that the aesthetic judgments that distinguish popular objects from high objects are not of his concern. He also rejects from the outset any analysis that seeks the audience’s own interpretations or uses of these objects. (Hence, for example, his discussion of sneakers will not touch on the dialectic between African-American street culture and the changing cultural meaning of this object.) Instead he wants to show the common historical trajectories of popular and high cultural objects in terms of their formal stylistic elements, thematic parallels, and general cultural philosophies. Bergesen argues that the patterns of change and development shared by both types of objects within a particular place and time reveal the broader historical stage of that society’s world political dominance.
This is an intriguing and important approach to popular culture. Bergesen essentially suggests that those mass-produced objects that make up the taken-for-granted world of our everyday lives have much more to them than we think. Indeed, he argues that they point to large-scale social and political patterns. Unfortunately, the analysis of these objects is ultimately unconvincing and unsatisfying. Because Bergesen rejects discussing the grounds for the very distinction between popular and high culture (and the rich literature and debates that surround this issue), the place of the consuming public in “making” [End Page 527] these objects what they are, and the politics of aesthetic judgment, the analysis is wanting in many ways. But, more importantly, it fails on its own purported grounds.
For example, the first analysis examines the athletic sneaker and argues that the stylistic categories used by art historians (archaic, classical, mannerist, baroque, rococo) apply to the history of this object as readily as they do to painting, sculpture, and architecture. Providing photographic reproductions of typical sneaker styles across decades (but no paintings or the like to which to compare them), Bergesen tries to illustrate the emergent stylistic pattern contained within this artifact. The justification of this application rests partly on the authority of art historian Heinrich Wolffiin’s formulations of the “abstract principles of style” (p. 13). Whether Wolffiin’s formulations are valid — applied to high or popular objects — is left unexamined. In the analysis that follows, the changing design and construction of sneakers is found to follow these stylistic rules of development. Unfortunately, the analysis is so general and broad that it is ineffectual. It is also circular in that the classification schema is justified because the sneakers seem to...