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independence his anxiety to rejoin his people will confine him to the most detailed
representation of reality. This is representative art which has no internal rhythms, an
art which is serene and immobile, evocative not of life but of death. Enlightened circles
are in ecstasies when confronted with this ‘inner truth’ which is so well expressed, but
we have the right to ask if this truth is in fact a reality, and if it is not already outworn
and denied, called in question by the epoch through which the people are treading out
their path towards history.

6 Lawrence Alloway (1926-1990) ‘The Arts and the Mass Media’

Alloway was a critic who worked in the early 1950s at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in
London, where he was party to the formation of the Independent Group in 1952. The
members of this group, which included Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, are gener­
ally credited with the establishment of Pop Art in Britain. Their typical work had two principal
aspects. They were critical of the idea of an autonomous, disinterested, ‘fine’ art oriented
around an exclusive notion of aesthetic quality, and more positively they attempted to
confront the implications of the new mass media and of their products, both for an adequate
theory of culture and for the practice of art. Published in Architectural Design, London,
February 1958, pp. 34-5, from which the present text is taken. (For Greenberg’s 'Avant-
Garde and Kitsch’ see IVDll.)

Before 1800 the population of Europe was an estimated 180 million; by 1900 this figure
had risen to 460 million. The increase of population and the industrial revolution that
paced it has, as everybody knows, changed the world. In the arts, however, traditional
ideas have persisted, to limit the definition of later developments. As Ortega pointed
out in The Revolt ofthe Masses: ‘the masses are to-day exercising functions in social life
which coincide with those which hitherto seemed reserved to minorities.’ As a result
the elite, accustomed to set aesthetic standards, has found that it no longer possesses the
power to dominate all aspects of art. It is in this situation that we need to consider the
arts of the mass media. It is impossible to see them clearly within a code of esthetics
associated with minorities with pastoral and upper-class ideas because mass art is urban
and democratic.[... ]
If justice is to be done to the mass arts which are, after all, one of the most remarkable
and characteristic achievements of industrial society, some of the common objections to
it need to be faced. A summary of the opposition to mass popular art is in Avant Garde
and Kitsch {Partisan Review, 1939, Horizon, 1940), by Clement Greenberg, an art critic
and a good one, but fatally prejudiced when he leaves modern fine art. By kitsch he
means ‘popular, commercial art and literature, with their chromeotypes, magazine
covers, illustrations, advertisements, slick and pulp fiction, comics. Tin Pan Alley
music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc.’. All these activities to Greenberg and the
minority he speaks for are ‘ersatz culture... destined for those who are insensible to
the value of genuine culture... Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academic
simulacra of genuine culture welcomes and cultivates this insensibility (my italics).
Greenberg insists that ‘all kitsch is academic’, but only some of it is, such as Cecil B.
De Mille-type historical epics which use nineteenth-century history-picture material. In
fact, stylistically, technically, and iconographically the mass arts are anti-academic.
716 The Moment of Modernism

Topicality and a rapid rate of change are not academic in any usual sense of the word,
which means a system that is static, rigid, self-perpetuating. Sensitiveness to the
variables of our life and economy enable the mass arts to accompany the changes
in our life far more closely than the fine arts which are a repository of time-binding
values.
The popular arts of our industrial civilization are geared to technical changes which
occur, not gradually, but violently and experimentally. The rise of the electronics era in
communications challenged the cinema. In reaction to the small TV screen, movie
makers spread sideways (CinemaScope) and back into space (Vista Vision). All the
regular film critics opposed the new array of shapes, but all have been accepted by the
audiences. Technical change as dramatized novelty (usually spurred by economic
necessity) is characteristic not only of the cinema but of all the mass arts. Colour
TV, the improvements in colour printing (particularly in American magazines), the
new range of paper back books; all are part of the constant technical improvements in
the channels of mass communication.
An important factor in communication in the mass arts is high redundancy. TV
plays, radio serials, entertainers, tend to resemble each other (though there are import­
ant and clearly visible differences for the expert consumer). You can go into the movies
at any point, leave your seat, eat an ice-cream, and still follow the action on the screen
pretty well. The repetitive and overlapping structure of modern entertainment works
in two ways: (1) it permits marginal attention to suffice for those spectators who like to
talk, neck, parade; (2) it satisfies, for the absorbed spectator, the desire for intense
participation which leads to a careful discrimination of nuances in the action.
There is in popular art a continuum from data to fantasy. Fantasy resides in, to
sample a few examples, film stars, perfume ads, beauty and the beast situations, terrible
deaths, sexy women. This is the aspect of popular art which is most easily accepted by
art minorities who see it as a vital substratum of the folk, as something primitive. This
notion has a history since Herder in the eighteenth century, who emphasized national
folk arts in opposition to international classicism. Now, however, mass-produced folk
art is international: Kim Novak, Galaxy Science Fiction, Mickey Spillane, are available
wherever you go in the West.
However, fantasy is always given a keen topical edge; the sexy model is shaped by
datable fashion as well as by timeless lust. Thus, the mass arts orient the consumer in
current styles, even when they seem purely, timelessly erotic and fantastic. The mass
media give perpetual lessons in assimilation, instruction in role-taking, the use of new
objects, the definition of changing relationships, as David Riesman has pointed out.
A clear example of this may be taken from science fiction. Cybernetics, a new word to
many people until 1956, was made the basis of stories in Astounding Science Fiction in
1950. SF aids the assimilation of the mounting technical facts of this century in which,
as John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, put it, ‘A man learns a pattern of
behaviour - and in five years it doesn’t work.’ Popular art, as a whole, offers imagery
and plots to control the changes in the world; everything in our culture that changes is
the material of the popular arts.
Critics of the mass media often complain of the hostility towards intellectuals and the
lack of respect for art expressed there, but, as I have tried to show, the feeling is
mutual. Why should the mass media turn the other cheek? What worries intellectuals is
the fact that the mass arts spread; they encroach on the high ground. [... ]
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The definition of culture is changing as a result of the pressure of the great audience,
which is no longer new but experienced in the consumption of its arts. Therefore, it
is no longer sufficient to define culture solely as something that a minority guards
for the few and the future (though such art is uniquely valuable and as precious as
ever). Our definition of culture is being stretched beyond the fine art limits imposed
on it by Renaissance theory, and refers now, increasingly, to the whole complex
of human activities. Within this definition, rejection of the mass produced arts is
not, as critics think, a defence of culture but an attack on it. The new role for
the academic is keeper of the flame; the new role for the fine arts is to be one of the
possible forms of communication in an expanding framework that also includes
the mass arts.

7 Allan Kaprow (b. 1927) from Assemblages, Environments and

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the author was a leading figure in the production
of Happenings, principally amongst the New York avant-garde. He had earlier sketched out
an interpretation of the ‘legacy of Jackson Pollock’ in which he read the implications of
Pollock’s work in terms of a move out of painting towards a synthetic art form involving
performances. These were to take place in real space and time, drawing on the gamut of the
products and processes of the modern, urbanized world: ‘The young artist of today need no
longer say "I am a painter” or "a poet” or ‘‘a dancer”. He is simply an "artist”. All of life will
be open to him.’ The text from which the present extracts are taken (pp. 151-5, 183-5,
187-96 and 207-8) was published in book form as Assemblages, Environments and
Happenings, New York, 1966. The Preface states that it was ‘largely written’ in 1959,
finished in 1960, and revised in 1961. It was further revised for its eventual publication,
when extra texts by other Happenings artists were added.

A critical turning point has been reached in a major area of avant-garde effort, which I
believe is entirely to the good but which is forcing upon us the possibly disagreeable
task of revising some cherished assumptions regarding the nature of the plastic arts.
Certain advanced works being done at this moment are rapidly losing their trad­
itional identities and something else, quite far-reaching in its implications, is taking
their place.
On the one hand, looking broadly at the whole of recent modern art, the differences
which were once so clear between graphic art and painting have practically been
eliminated; similarly, the distinctions between painting and collage, between collage
and construction, between construction and sculpture, and between some large con­
structions and a quasi architecture. [... ]
This continuity is significant, the critical issue in fact; for drawing and painting, and in
a large measure sculpture and the so-called minor arts, have until now been completely
dependent upon the conditions set down by the structure of the house; one need only
imagine a canvas without a flat wall and the cubic enframement of the room, a chair on an
irregular floor... Artists for at least a century have worked as though the only thing of
importance were the work in front of them, a world unto itself. [... ] But I am saying that
it is important to recognize very clearly how deeply involved with each other on a
primary level the plastic arts have been. Once you change the conditions for one, you