Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste by Herbert J. Gans, and: Culture and Its Creators: Essays in Honor of Edward Shils ed. by Joseph Ben-David and Terry Nichols Clark (review)

Books 331 the title indicates, it isa speciesof ’written’picture ofthe growing consciousness of art in this century in general, in the U S A . in particular, and, as such, it touches on far more than do art histories covering the same period destined for the public or the classroom. The Art World touches not only on works of art and their makers but also on art buyers, collectors and curators and on the institutions inseparable from the art world, which the selections included in this book define adequately, such as museums, galleries, sales, exhibitions, critics and criticism, the wholecomplex cultural scenecentered on that vague word ‘art’. The anthology thus turns out to be a species of view of art history in the making, not only reporting on events and works but also on perceptions, opinions, suppositions and assumptions , such as probably existedever sinceart was chosen to be the subject ofjournalistic criticismat the time of the flrstsalons of the 18th century. What ARTnews has done with this book is, in effect, to mount a species of art history as collage, an anthology of primary sources such as would be welcome for thdse ages in which the machine of publicity was less well, if at all, developed than it is today. Perhaps the only thing lacking from the perspective of an historian looking at primary sources is advertisements, which are inseparable from the art magazine: a chosen few per decade would surely have been as revealingasthe articles. The articles are very good indeed and cover not only art and artists but controversies and the social scene as it relates to art; also included are many seminalstudies of movements and events, ranging from the famous 1913Armory show in New York City to Pop art. Those by noted critics, philosophers, art historians and artists, and the more pedestrian texts, which report on current events in the art world, make for a fineand fascinating, lively and eminently readable history of art since 1902, when publication of ARTnews began. Popular Cultureand High Culture: An Analysisand Evaluationof Taste. Herbert J. Cans. Basic Books, New York and London, 1974. 179 pp. $10.00; E9.40. Culture and Its Creators: Essays in Honor of Edward Shils. Joseph Ben-David and Terry Nichols Clark, eds. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill. and London, 1977. 325 pp. $10.25. Reviewed by Gifford Phillips” Cans has written a spirited defense of popular culture in the U S A . But is popular culture in this country in any way threatened and in need of a defense? With three commercial television networks reporting record profits, magazine racks jammed with periodicals old and new, motion pictures such as ‘Star Wars’ breaking attendance records, one might doubt the need. He, however, is less interested in practical issues than in academic arguments. Himself an intellectual (he teaches sociology at Columbia University), Cans seeks to rebut the argument of contemporary intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse, Dwight McDonald and Harold Rosenberg who have maintained that ‘massculture’ ismindless,soporific and harmful to both its users and society at large. Cans argues as social scientist and social philosopher but never as either art critic or aesthetician. As a social scientist he notes that empirical studies of popular cultures do not bear out charges that it is socially harmful, though he admits there are gray areas such as the effect of violent television productions on susceptible viewers. He turns to democratic social philosophy to support his main contention-that all ‘taste cultures’ are equal in value. In his system there are fivetaste cultures ranging from ‘highculture’ at the top to ‘quasi-folk low culture’ at the bottom. Each taste culture has acorresponding ‘tastepublic’, a groupthat comprises the ‘users’ of the particular culture. He thinks that each taste public derivesan equal amount of satisfaction from the offerings of its own taste culture; hence, from this viewpoint, which is a social-philosophical one, all taste cultures are equal in value. Since he holds this viewpoint, he regards most attempts to ‘improve’cultural standards as wrong-headed and futile. ‘The fact of the matter is that people are not receptacles who will accept any facts or ideas poured into them. Rather, people tend to...