Having gone to school a while back, we all just assumed educational standards would keep getting higher, that eventually people would know more, think better, and everything would be great. Look around. Is a novelist, Hemingway, Faulkner, Baldwin likely to be a culture hero these days? Where are the visual artists more celebrated for their images than for their bankroll? We have presidential debates in which candidates imply demeaning things about each other’s genitals, around the water cooler people discuss last night’s talent contest, and our major sport strategizes on-field attrition, so maybe we aren’t getting smarter after all.
How does a gene pool become dumber in just a couple of generations you may ask? Well high school is mostly about football, it has a regular slot on the news, and colleges with huge administrative burdens have become more like businesses, granting ‘cliff’s notes’ degrees, reducing support faculty to sharecropper status all the while building larger stadiums. That might be part of it. Television has given us cookie-cutter role models, aggressive cops and violent criminals interacting with maximum firepower, along with comedies featuring idiot fathers and sensible but one dimensional moms. It further demeans us at regular intervals suggesting we could be more virile, smell better, and drive a bigger truck. After a while, night after night, folks begin to assume some of those characteristics without really noticing.
Art was made stupid on purpose, and it’s ability to positively influence thought and identity were wiped out from the top. They said they did it to win the war of ideas with the russians. They said abstract art represented our individualism, our freer imaginations, our dynamic cutting edge ‘newness’ to the world, and as such abstract art was immensely subsidized by a public that didn’t care much for it. Scalding ridicule in a co-opted press was their major weapon against traditional forms -- voices were silenced, and there have been consequences.
One thing you can say about reproducing soup can labels as fine art -- it’s dumb. Gloriously dumb is how they liked to think of it, and ‘everyone famous for fifteen minutes’ is a slogan nihilistic enough to poison any desire to accomplish anything. Andy and his ilk happily pissed on notions of integrity and artistic merit in favor of selling the merchandize, selling the shelves, selling the floor, and we, at least the ones who merit media coverage, bought it by the pound. How’d we all get so dumb we’d want comic books for movies and baboons for politicians you’d like to know, and some of it was in the art.
It’s time to turn it around and move forward. How many fixes are there in the cultural toolkit? Substantially upgrading the educational system would work out fine maybe twenty five years from now, and distributing wealth more evenly would help if it was possible without violence and displacement. What is a matter of immediate free choice is what art to own, and an art that embodies struggle and accomplishment, intimacy and reflection, commitment and resolve would be nice to have around the house as the language sheds syllables and the media embraces low common denominators.
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