COMM526/Midterm
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COMM526 midterm exam, 11 March 2010
David Shields’ latest book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, was featured in the Los Angeles Times last Sunday. Critic Susan Salter Reynolds walks her readers through Shields’ critique of contemporary literature; from its genre conventions to its industrial missteps. The otherwise positive review concludes that Shields’ book, though “raw and gorgeous”, is ultimately an “adolescent” exercise in anger and frustration (Reynolds, 2010, pp. E8). Reynolds sympathizes with Shields’ distress at a “loud, phony, unsubtle” culture that has “failed us,” but, she assures him, the “hollow” and “empty” are soon forgotten, leaving behind only the writing that successfully “transcends the self” and “continues to talk to us.”
Printed in the Art & Books section, one might expect to find an example of such “transcendent” artwork nearby Reynolds’ review. Instead, the Art & Books section reads like an addendum to Shields’ “manifesto” – alternately celebrating and wallowing in the same preoccupation with authenticity, commercialization, and transgression. Nearly every article details the crossing of a contested border: pop singers collaborate with chewing gum manufacturers, advertising firms release art films, a poet meditates on soft drink sloganeering. Taken as a whole, Art & Books reveals the key concerns vexing the media and culture industries.
Robert McChesney recognized that points of contact between business and art are sites of great anxiety when he identified “hypercommercialism” among the “real trends” driving systemic media change at turn of the 21st century (1999, pp. 17). He acknowledged the intertwined histories of pop media and commercialism but cautioned that changes to the regulatory and technological structures during the 1980s and 1990s had enabled commercialization at an unprecedented scale. The high profit margins of hypercommercial activities such as co-branding and cross-promotion disincentivized media corporations from competing with one another. Instead, enabled and emboldened by the deregulation encoded in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, they formed a highly-stable, vertically-integrated media “oligarchy” to distribute risk and stabilize the sector (McChesney, 1999, pp. 19). McChesney observed a paradoxical outcome of this rapid restructuring: an increasing number of media channels broadcasting decreasingly diverse news and entertainment content.
Chris Lee’s report on the complex relationships among pop stars and advertising firms indicates a persistent concern about hypercommercialism in pop media (2010, pp. E1). Lee explains (and McChesney implies) that “music purists” are shocked by the notion that pop singers might be engaged in commercial activity outside of music-making. But the political economic history of the music industry reveals that star-labor has never been limited to the production of recordings and performances (Chapple & Garofalo, 1977; Suisman, 2009). Of course, it is not a factual history that inspires Lee and McChesney’s imagined “purist.” The pop music industry is enmeshed in a powerful mythology constructed and maintained mutually with fans, artists, and artifacts. When fashion designer John Varvatos denies coercing rock musicians to model for him, he does so out of a commitment to the mythological fact that rock musicians only do what they “want” to do (Lee, 2010, pp. E10). To suggest that the musicians co-brand products for any other reason is to undermine the mythology to which all stakeholders (inclusive of audiences) are invested.
Pop mythology is cited and reinforced by Steve Appleford’s profile of Daniel Davies’ “hard-driving rock” group, Year Long Disaster. Appleford details a “hard-working young band” but does not investigate the social and economic circumstances by which the band’s members might travel regularly and freely, employ a “Grammy-winning” producer, or perform at well-known nightclubs in Los Angeles. Even after revealing that Davies is the son of the Kinks’ Dave Davies, Appleford does not interrogate the advantages that might be afforded the son of a famous father. This lack of critical attention is not intended to deceive the reader, however, but to endear him. The familiar pop mythological tropes of the “hard-driving”, “hard-working young band” are a source of pleasure for critics, artists, and fans.
For McChesney’s hypercommercial critique to be effective, it must be divested of its interest in the mythology of pop musicians as anything other than commercial actors. Damian Kulash of pop group OK Go invokes and inverts McChesney’s concern when he describes advertising as “one of the only distribution methods that still works” (Lee, 2010, pp. E10). For Kulash, a professional pop musician, the music industry no longer provides the monetary capital necessary for him to engage in the mythological activities of a pop star. Rather than cease recording albums, making music videos, and going on tour, Kulash secures funding for these activities through advertising labor. The sustainability of this transition is possible only if Kulash succeeds in shifting the pop music mythology to accommodate an advertising-based capitalization structure. He makes this concern plain in his description of the “hell-no criterion” by which he can/will only work with brands who do not “demean [or] cannibalize the meaning or artistry of [his] song” (Lee, 2010, pp. E10).
In a historically distant Los Angeles, Horkheimer and Adorno lamented that pop media “need no longer pretend to be art” as the emerging culture industry was “just business” (1972, pp. 121). The nuance with which Kulash and Varvatos must manage their many relationships suggests that neither art nor business is ever “just business.” Elsewhere in Art & Books, Ross Simonini describes poet Tony Hoagland “walking the line between the high poetic and the mass-media idiom” with work that is not only “significant art” but also “the best kind of entertainment” (2010, pp. E8). Liesl Bradner recounts a similar co-mingling at an exhibition of paintings by Yoshitaka Amano, a painter best known for his work on the Final Fantasy video game series. And in a profile of sculptor Ruben Ochoa, Holly Myers spends as many inches on the artist’s working-class background as on his many prestigious exhibitions.
A generous reading of Horkheimer and Adorno by John Durham Peters suggests that the alienation of the “culture industry” is not the result of any particular category of art-making but a widespread lack of distinction between “high” and “low” forms (Peters, 2003, 68). McChesney seems similarly frustrated by ambiguous intersections of art and commerce. He recalls a film industry analyst commenting that “the [content of the] movie is almost incidental” to its commercial exploitation (McChesney, 1999, 39). Kulash’s engagement with advertisers seems to make the various commercial and artistic stakes much more clear. As consumers’ “believability” in advertising continues to fall (McChesney, 1999, 40), might transparency alleviate some of the tension that has historically arisen at the intersection of culture and commercialism?
Scott Lipps, owner of a modeling agency, claims that cross-promotion is no longer “taboo” (Lee, 2010, pp. E10). Though the anxiety of the Art & Books section suggests that his declaration may be premature, David Ng’s review of Logorama indicates that general acceptance may not be far off. Logorama is a short animated film that depicts a “chaotic, alt-universe L.A. where vehicles and buildings are represented by brand logos” (Ng, 2010, pp. E3). Though the film seems at first blush to be a textbook example of “culture jamming,” it was produced by a design firm best known for its work in advertising. Rather than investigate this seeming contraction, Ng refers to Logorama as an example of détournment in which “cultural symbols” are used “against themselves” (2010, pp. E3). He concludes that Logorama’s “vast, hypnotic world” of living advertisements presents a realization of Guy Debord’s critique of a society in which all direct experience is replaced by spectacular representation (Ng, 2010, pp. E3).
Though Debord and his colleagues in the Situationist International likely did not anticipate an advertising company producing anti-advertising propaganda films, Ng’s enthusiasm for Logorama suggests an unexpected pleasure in the “taboo” of hypercommercialism. Perhaps the change that most unsettles the Art & Books section is not among the structural shifts identified by McChesney but rather a cultural shift from an anti-commercial pop mythology to one that accepts hypercommercial activity. In the same sense that Horkheimer & Adorno were driven mad by the “middling” of “high” and “low” cultural forms, perhaps hypercommercialism tastes most foul when it is hidden from view. How might the entrenched industrial oligarchy respond to a transformed pop mythology that accepts radically transparent co-branding and cross-promotion? Is it capable of incorporating popular embrace of the hypercommercialism taboo or, as Kulash suggests, do advertising relationships provide an alternative funding model by which the vertically-integrated corporate structures are made irrelevant? Finally, what are the constraints of such a structure and what new productive possibilities emerge? Could the “raw”, “organic”, “transcendent” artworks Shields demands in his manifesto be produced with the generous help of a corporate sponsor?
References
Appleford, S. (2010, March 7) A chip off the hard-driving rock block. Los Angeles Times, pp. E10. Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/07/entertainment/la-ca-year-long-disaster7-2010mar07
Bradner, L. (2010, March 7) Wide-eyed appeal. Los Angeles Times, pp. E3. Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/07/entertainment/la-ca-japanese-pop7-2010mar07
Chapple, S. & Garofalo, R. (1977) Rock n roll is here to pay: the history and politics of the music industry. Chicago: Nelson Hall.
Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T. W. (1972) The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception (John Cumming, Trans.) Dialectic of Enlightenment (pp. 120-167). New York: Herder and Herder.
Kellogg, C. (2010, March 7) Book tour? More like a safari. Los Angeles Times, pp. E1, E6. Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/07/entertainment/la-ca-book-tour7-2010mar07
Lee, C. (2010, March 7) This music is sponsored by .... Los Angeles Times, pp. E1, E10. Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/07/entertainment/la-ca-commercials7-2010mar07
McChesney, R. W. (1999) Rich media, poor democracy. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Ng, D. (2010, March 7) Brand names rule in short ‘Logorama’. Los Angeles Times, pp. E3. Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/07/entertainment/la-ca-logorama7-2010mar07
Myers, H. (2010, March 7) A perpetual construction zone. Los Angeles Times, pp. E9. Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/07/entertainment/la-ca-ochoa7-2010mar07
Peters, J. D. (2003) The subtlety of horkheimer and adorno: Reading “The Culture Industry”. In Katz, E., Peters, J. D., Liebes, T., and Orloff, A. (Eds.), Canonic Text in Media Research (pp. 58-73). Cambridge:Polity.
Reynolds, S. S. (2010, March 7) The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. Los Angeles Times, pp. E8. Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/07/entertainment/la-ca-david-shields7-2010mar07
Simonini, R. (2010, March 7) Drowning in pop-culture slogans. Los Angeles Times, pp. E8. Retrieved from: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/07/entertainment/la-ca-tony-hoagland7-2010mar07
Suisman, D. (2009) Selling sounds: The commercial revolution in american music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
