In the mid 2000s the media collectively decided that pop culture (i.e., the media) was to blame for the drastic rise of eating disorders and body image issues amongst young women and girls. Pop culture is, as we know, also one of the culprits behind continued racism and sexism, xenophobia, violence, and all the other bad stuff we do. And we have, rightfully, come to criticize portrayals of humans and situations that advance these negative social constructs. This was clear when, a few months ago, the internet went back and forth over whether Gone Girl was intensely sexist or strongly feminist (the internet has yet to decide).
I was struck by the idea that the movie had to be either. It seems that the film could not just exist as a story without a sociopolitical identity, and that this identity had to reflect a series of decisions and ideals held by those behind the scenes, namely, David Fincher (the director, who has a complex history with depicting women). Of course, if too many films depict a race or gender or other social group horribly (or don’t depict them at all), this is both reflective of and contributing to a huge problem in our culture. We do currently and should continue to dissect what film, television, music, etc., mean for our society. However, I wonder if David Fincher sees his own work in the same ways in which we’ve decided to view it. I have the feeling, rather, that he just wanted to make a beautiful film- art.
This increased focus on pop culture’s intentionality places a responsibility on filmmakers, musicians, etc., to consider their work within a social context, and examine its possible implications. It also might transport that work firmly outside of the safety and freedom of the artistic space.
When we consider art, we do so taking for granted its place in social influence. Sculptures of naked women, if they are art, are not meant to influence or determine the shapes of women’s bodies in the present, like thin actors or singers are. They are beyond this. The Birth of A Nation was, at the time of its release in 1915, immediately lauded as an artistic achievement, and is still taught in film studies classes across the country. Despite it being widely condemned as astoundingly racist, we cannot shun it for its actual effect on the sociopolitical state of the early 20th century, as its artistic merit is seen as immensely valuable. It holds a 100% approval on Rotten Tomatoes.
Because really, where’s the line between pop culture and art? When Taylor Swift justifies her pulling all of her music from Spotify saying, “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable…”, referring to her own music, which I love, do we believe her? When I first read that, I laughed and rolled my eyes at what I deemed T-swizzle’s radical self-importance. “Who does she think she is?” I have certainly described her as an artist, and, reflecting, I realize that in having few synonyms for “musician”, we have casually thrown “artist” into the mix. The bold move here is not in calling her an “artist”, but in calling her work “art” (and now we get to consider the fascinating semantics of the word growing distanced from the meaning of its root). I am not at all attempting to position myself as our national arbiter of art distinction; some people have never questioned that “Shake It Off” and “You Belong With Me” are classified as art.
Swift is leveraging a strong economic argument to pose herself as a true artist. She said “art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable…”, and then proceeded to make her own music more rare, and thus inherently more valuable, by pulling it from the streaming service. Following the guidelines set out in her argument, she made herself an artist.
And definitionally, her music, all music, and my 10 year old sister’s drawings just are art. I, however, am talking about the kind of art we hold with regard, that which we culturally agree has value that is hard to monetize, but is nonetheless real and apparent, and renders the thing beyond the responsibility for its social repercussions. The broader cultural consciousness does not hold the basic economics so dear, and instead uses much less clear metrics to determine artistry, hence my raised eyebrows at T-Swift’s proclamation. Does people liking and wanting her music enough to pay for it really qualify it as art, in this treasured and loose way? And, if it is art, are she and artists like her absolved from the public responsibility they may hold as influencers of society and politics?
One useful and baseline explanation of this is simply the matter of consumption and subsequent influence. What we generally think of as the “high arts”- classical music, painting, theater, sculpture, etc.- have quite a small audience relative to a Hollywood production, and as such do not bear the same responsibility (or privilege?) of informing larger cultural phenomena. Tied to this is the amount of fanfare and/or obsession that follows the piece of art considered- surely, if 15-year-olds began citing The Birth of Venus as their body inspiration, as they do with actors and musicians, we would be more critical of the piece and its place in our cultural cannon. Accepting this, we can move beyond the line of “high art” to consider what demarcates artistry and artistic value amongst the more popular art forms.
Knowing that classic, high arts are beyond public sociopolitical responsibility, and that low-brow pop culture is completely culpable, it’s useful to look at the space between them to figure out the points of separation.
Eminem is a great example of the blurred distinction. He is, undoubtedly, an amazing rapper-or, at least, he was. He is also arguably a terrible person, if you take his lyrics to be even slightly indicative of his thoughts and feelings. And while he had his detractors even at his peak, they came out the losers. Eminem was able to openly address his critics and essentially body slam them; he was a great rapper, an artist, and whatever you wanted to read into his lyrics was irrelevant to that fact. Sobriety and non-violence really didn’t work for Em musically, though, and now that he’s lost his some of his prestige, people are wondering whether the misogyny bit can still work for him with more force. I have even said that Eminem was a better artist when he was an addict who hated everyone, and in that betrayed that I was more concerned with his art than his potential negative influence.
Or we can take an entire category: Diva, a word reserved for black women (including Mariah Carey), those who have successfully styled themselves after black women, and Celine Dion, also tends to describe people in this liminal space. Is new diva Ariana Grande’s music art? She is certainly very talented. She is also followed by a horde of teens, which somehow seems to lessen her hold on the artistic space, trapping her in pop stardom. The fact that she has been described as a human cupcake, to a resounding “omg that’s so true”, probably does not help.
Christopher Nolan and David Fincher are both examples of filmmakers who straddle the line, with many of their feature films being highly successful both commercially and critically. For Fincher, director of Se7en, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Fight Club, the Social Network, and more, the wider the audience of his films, it seems the more criticism he receives for his treatment of female characters, which has in truth always been shaky. Meanwhile, his older films become new classics, because as I’ll discuss below, you don’t have to be sociopolitically responsible in the past-tense. Nolan, on the other hand, set the bar high early in his career with Memento, a “cult classic”, which is short-hand for “people want to tell you how great it is and you’ll feel bad about yourself if you don’t get why it’s so great”. He made arguably his best film with The Dark Knight (although my favorite is The Prestige- different post), which left critics and the public to gush over it endlessly as one of the best films of the decade, all so that it could be forgotten at awards season, save technical categories and Heath Ledger’s posthumous win.
In considering these and many other examples, there seem to be a few qualifications that implicitly distinguish art from today’s pop culture in the realm of high levels of actual popularity, and as such separate the culpable from the free.
- There’s the classic question of credibility. The prominence of Hipsterism in all its forms has complicated the issue of credibility- now, to be popular is an immediate challenge to one’s credibility, and distance from the mainstream an instant boon. Hipsterism is often perceived as a very recent phenomenon (the damn hipster Millenials- everything is our fault, right?), but, especially in the context of credibility, it has the same ring as 90s cries of “selling out”. Films and music of that decade were marked with complaints of people losing their heart to find financial success, to the extent that having found success at all must imply a fundamental lack. There was even a Disney Channel Original Movie damning the sell outs.
2. There are also structures put in place meant to denote art, to separate it from the lightness of pop despite literal popularity. The Academy Awards are one such structure, having forced us all to adhere to its snooty guidelines and outright hatred of comedy or joy. The Academy Awards show us the power of declaring your rightness and then sticking to your guns. It is an obscured governing body that annually outlines the characteristics of quality with little regard for currency, critical input, diversity, progress, or real life. Yet, they do consistently nominate strong films (in this I mean that while we can complain that things are frequently left out, there are rarely bad films nominated), and have created such a fortified image of quality control that to challenge it broadly would be to fall into bad taste. The Grammy’s were once a musical equivalent to this, although they have recently fallen into VMA-like disrepair.
3. The skills required to make art, in the something more than T-Sweezy sense, still have to be easily identifiable, classical skills. Swift’s most impressive skill is her branding and relatability. She is not an extremely impressive singer, nor can she dance, as she’s joked about; she is not, like an Emma Stone, universally charming, but rather is quite divisive; her songwriting is fantastic in terms of sheer quantity, but it’s not as though she’s the most clever writer around (although All Too Well has some great lines- “you call me up again just to break me like a promise”. woah.); she is of course pretty and thin, but those are essentially just in keeping form- her image was not so strongly built on her looks and sexuality as many of her contemporaries. Rather, she has an elusive, magical skill: we all like her. We all like her openly, or ironically, or emotionally, or in spite of ourselves. Frat bros play her music and either own up to loving it or say it’s for ladiezzz. Teen girls either feel she’s written about their lives or wish she had. I sing “Style” at the top of my lungs and ponder important questions like whether I’m basic or a feminist or both or neither. Swifty’s skill is everything and nothing at once.
4. Nostalgia and age make art. You could find countless quotes by artists and commoners alike about how art is more valuable once the artist is dead. Partially, this is the same economic argument made by Tay-Tay; if the artist is dead we can’t get anymore of their art, making it rare, making it more valuable. We get it. But there is also an age or nostalgia factor at play. We always romanticize the previous generation, in a “you kids and your rock and roll” cliché, and value that which came before more than that which presently exists. In fact, it’s tied to issue #1, credibility: we all know you’re much cooler if your favorite band is a “classic”, or you talk about how much you loved Kanye’s first album as opposed to Yeezus, or you can annoy people by explaining why Citizen Kane is the best film of all time.
5. Level of contribution: So, recently Beyoncé was half-called out for photoshopping a few photos on her Instagram account, and it amounted to a blip in the media. Everyone was moderately disappointed, and then moved on immediately to another unimportant story because Beyoncé is above these kinds of scandals, even when they could constitute a PR nightmare for similar artists. Even when we criticize Queen Bey for contributing to a real problem like body image, it’s done so with some passivity. She’s already an institution, and we really aren’t that outraged at her small misdeeds as we are for mere celebrities. That is because Beyoncé’s level of contribution to the game, no, her art, is greater than what she could possibly detract at this point.
This too is true of Michael Jackson, whom we simply cannot abandon despite the terrible things public opinion has decided he’s probably done. He’s MJ. The internet considered boycotting Woody Allen’s films briefly, but social movement is not why Magic In The Moonlight performed so poorly. The Birth of a Nation exists here as well. The film, which glorifies the KKK and is truly horrifying unless you are a member of the KKK, also changed the way movies were made and is technically stunning. #BlackLivesMatter, but so does the art of filmmaking. This list could continue with artists who have behaved badly, and the point would be the same- if you’ve done enough for the art, changed the game or revolutionized an industry, we can separate your deeds from your art, and we certainly won’t hate you for how you may be irresponsible in your position of power and influence.
I have obviously not come up with a clear line. But still, I think this is a question that is real and interesting to consider, if at the very least because artists themselves do. Taylor Swift tried to legitimize herself by literally upping her own value; Beyoncé’s “visual album” was innovative and deeply, well, artistic; Lady Gaga went so far as to call her last album Art Pop. What are they shooting for here, in trying to break out of the Pop superstar bubble, which seems like quite a nice place to be? It could simply be to go down in the history books as more than a singer, or an actor, or a director, but an era and an institution, an inspiration. But, with that, I wonder if they’re conscious of having taken themselves out of our common plane of influential responsibility, and into a place of creative freedom and wonder. What is it like there, where Gone Girl is neither feminist or sexist, but just art?
Originally published at medium.com on January 16, 2015.
