The concept of a shared cultural vocabulary is
related to yet different from that of cultural literacy. Cultural literacy
comprises the knowledge of general history and of great works of literature,
music, art and philosophy essential to be a good citizen. Too often
conservative critics present lists of what constitutes cultural literacy that
focus almost exclusively on the traditional works of white European males. More
progressive critics will include the works of non-westerners and women and of
newer art forms such as film and graphic novels. These critics—both
conservative and progressive—all postulate cultural literacy as proscriptive:
here is what you need to know.
Cultural vocabulary takes a different approach—one
that describes instead of prescribes—by defining the cultural vocabulary as the
body of information that most people in a culture share. Whether or not we
should have read T.S. Eliot is not relevant to a description of the cultural vocabulary;
what counts is that in 2014 a business magazine such as The Economist will cleverly reference Eliot’s “The Waste Land” by
opening an article with “April has been a cheerful month for the Affordable
Care Act…”
Those like E.D. Hirsch and Harold Bloom who
construct lists of great literature and other cultural artifacts with which
every culturally literate person should be familiar must frown dyspeptically at
the symbolism of a TV commercial becoming as much a part of our cultural
heritage as Huckleberry Finn or the founding of Jamestown. I’m sure that
Bloom’s prescriptive cultural vocabulary would exclude Mean Joe Greene throwing
a jersey or Mikey liking a dry cereal.
The argument concerning what constitutes cultural
literacy and therefore should and should not be part of the cultural vocabulary
goes back centuries. In Greek times, critics argued whether the low art of
pottery carried the weight of painting. In late medieval times and the
Renaissance, the argument was between Latin versus the vernacular. For the past
200 years, the argument has been about the relative merits of high and low
culture, between serious novels and potboilers, literature and comic books,
Beethoven and the Beach Boys. In all these instances, critics have argued about
the relative merits of high and low (or popular) art.
But a
television commercial is something different from both high culture and low
culture. It represents commercial culture. Its makers intend not to edify nor
to amuse, but to sell a product, service or idea.
Commercial culture has a history that may be as long
as that of either high or low cultures, thanks to the fact that those who pay
for propaganda are usually those who control the social order. The cultural dictators of
all ages, especially the conservative ones, have tended to warmly embrace
commercial culture. The Aeneid, a piece of propaganda
purchased by the Roman Emperor Augustus, makes all the lists of the cultural
essentials. I think one can make a compelling case that the psalms were works
of pure propaganda meant solely to influence public opinion: King David (or the
writers he hired) created our beloved psalms to improve public opinion about
his actions, which was at a low after he had used the armies of Israel’s
enemies to take over the country and then sent his best general out to die so
he could cavort in the streets with the man’s wife. English literature students
still read early Irish poems, which were little more than paid political
announcements for Irish chieftains. We see print and poster advertisements by
Toulouse-Lautrec, the Russian Constructivists, Depero and other visual artists
hanging in art museums all over the world. Every serious film buff lauds the
technical aspects of Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films, made for and financed
by the Nazis. Many commercial works have managed to make it into the exalted
cultural literacy pantheon of authoritarian critics of all ilks.
Before the advertising of products and services
began sometime in the 19th century, virtually all works of commercial culture
were either masked as entertainments or part of a liturgy. Nowadays, commercial
culture will sometimes mask itself in movies which have as their sole purpose
the selling of merchandise, e.g., movies about comic book heroes that spin off
action figures, costumes, masks, toys, clothing, book marks, calendars,
coasters, decorative boxes, jewelry, jigsaw puzzles, mugs, napkins, note cards,
pens, tote bags, trays, lunch boxes and other branded merchandise. But more
often than not, commercial culture today involves a naked sales pitch. That our
cultural vocabulary so quickly consumes the naked sales pitches of “where’s the
beef” and “can you hear me now” reflects the crass materialism of the age.
The development of the mass media of advertising,
and then of film, radio, television, video games and the Internet has led to
commercial culture playing a far great role in determining our cultural
vocabulary than before World War II. We can see the hegemony of commercial
culture everywhere: the enshrinement of commercial or decorative artists such
as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons in our pantheon of the visual arts; the widespread
tattooing of Coke and other brand logos on body parts; and the widespread
interests in celebrity culture (which I define as a preoccupation with the
commercial transactions of people who are famous for no reason except perhaps
for being wealthy). All represent the hegemony that commercial culture has
achieved.
That hegemony shines through the recent ending of the Madman series, which, like the end of
the first season, asserts that commercials are an art form by setting up
situations in which the protagonist Don Draper transforms the discontents of
his life into seminal TV commercials—at the end of the first season, his memories
of his family, now fractured by his infidelity, becomes the Kodak “Moments”
commercial; the last scene of the last episode of the series shows Draper,
having found peace through transcendental meditation, dreaming up the wildly
popular “I’d like to teach the world to sing” Coke commercials. The sublimation
of real life into art has a long history—Dante, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Joyce,
Proust, Hemingway, the list of authors whose works are at least partially
autobiographical seems endless. With Mad
Men, we see commercial art imitating life in a work of dramatic art about
commercial art.