©

ART AND POP

We began this book with a commonplace observation and a simple

hypothesis. The observation was that a significant number ofBritish
pop musicians from the 1960s to the present were educated and first
started performing in art schools. The hypothesis was that its art
school connections explain the extraordinary international impact of
British music since the Beatles. In musicological terms the history of
post-war pop remains a history of Afro-American sounds. What
British musicians have added is style, image, self-consciousness - an
attitude to what commercial music c~ld andili~ld be. This attitude
has been influential even when a particular British genre (like punk)
didn't actually sell records.
Our aim, then, was to examine how and why art schools got
implicated in British pop music and to assess the effects of their art
school experience on British pop musicians. But even in the early
stages·ofthis research it became clear that to approach pop this way
was to challenge two of the fundamental assumptions of contem-
porary cultural analysis.
First, virtually all general sociological accounts of capitalist
societies assume a clear distinction between 'high' and 'mass'
culture, between the bourgeois world of fine arts, academic music,

(!)
 ARTINTO POP ARTAND POP

rJ.._serious literature, etc., on the one hand, and the popular world of seriously. The star system works by making them publicly respon-
TV, the tabloid press, Radio 1 music, etc., on the other. Art schools sible for their own sounds; the sales apparatus of the music press,
cross these divisions in terms of both class and ideology;-art school radio and television depends on the star interview, o~ the mI,!h. of
graduates are petit-bourgeois professionals who, as pop musicians, individua-Lp..r.2duction, which is why critical theorists fiave always
appfy 'high· art' skills and identities to a mass cultural form. To dismissed the stars' significance. 2 The only sociological theory to
follow through what this means is to raise general questions about investigate performers at all is the interactionist approach developed
the high/mass cultural divide. in the USA by Howard Becker. Becker's pioneering studies of jazz
j;"Second, our questions can only be answered by putting musicians musicians in the 1950s have been applied to pop music by several of
themselves at the centre of the pop process. Embedded in the his students but the most important book for our purposes is his
high/mass cultural distinction is the assumption that while high own Art Worlds.(H. Stith Bennett's On BecomingA Rock Musician,for
art mea!!ing_u;_ derived from the artists themselves - from their example, describes an entrepreneurial career model that doesn't fit
inte3tions, experience ~ze~us- mass cult~ral ~nin_s; lies~ the British 'revolt into style'.) Our concern is how, in art schools, a
fuT1ct~IL(to make m~~Y~_J;;gro~uce1lic social oi:_der)~Recent particular tension between creativity and commerce is confronted
lfnguistically based cultural theories, which navechallcnged the and how pop music works as a solution. Becker addresses this ten-
authority ofhigh artists, have only thus confirmed the unimportance : sion in a variety of art settings and, in particular, shows how the
* of pop producers - all that matters is the text; all that's needed to·
understand it is a rigorous textual reading. Mass cultural forms - >
notion of'art' itself is constructed and maintained in social practice,
under what circumstances mass culture becomes 'art', art becomes
1
advertisements, TV show~~-Hollywood films, Top Ten records - mass culture. It is certainly arguable that high culture is itself simply
are all subject to the same kind of literary critical analysis. This now a mass cultural myth, a category created by specific state and
approach links Leavisites to poststructuralists, makes Barthes as dis- market forces, specific middle-brow mass media - museums and ex-
missive of mass culture as any Scrutineer, and even when critics try hibitions, poster and 'classic' book publishers, TV shows and radio
to disentangle the 'productive forces' that structure a film or record programmes. Becker reveals, illuminatingly, just how much work
they still read back from the text to its meaning. goes into ensuring art's 'autonomy'."'.l-
The populist version of structuralism - seniiotics for people who
like pop music and read Biff postcards - finds the positive meaning
Postmodernism
of mass culture not in its making but in its use. Dick Hebdige's Sub-
culture,for example, reclaims mass culture for art via the concept of The term 'art rock' still carries the resonance of a particular form of
style. Creativity, self-expression, protest come back into the late 1960s/early 1970s album music, but as John Rockwell makes
picture - at the moment of consumption. Hebdige provides a sug- clear in The Rolling Stone IllustratedHistory of Rock & Roll, the claim
gestive account of how this works (and breaks out of the simple- that underlay art rockers' experiments was that their compositions
minded subculture/working class equation of his Birmingham col- 'paralleled, imitated, or were inspired by other forms of "higher",
leagues) but he retains the traditional art/commerce categories, with more "serious" music.' 4 'Art' here referred to a distinction within
the artist-consumer (romantically symbolized by Genet) allowed musicalpractices (and art rock was a genre whose proponents were,
brief moments of expressive defiance in the market place before indeed, more likely to have had music than art education) whereas
being absorbed, once more, by mass fashion. 1 Under what condi- our concern is with the interplay of pop and fine art ideas, much
tions such gestures are possible, how consumers and producers more evident now than in the art rock period. The new generation of
relate in the manufacture of style remains unclear. pop culture magazines, The Faceand Blitz and i-D, fill the shelves of
In the pop world itself, of course, musicians are taken very the Arts Council Book Shop in Long Acre as well as the racks of

@- <1)
 ART INTO POP • • ARTAND POP

rovincial W .H. Smiths; they are consumer guides to the latest sounds links with a pre-capitalist past were snapped. At the same time,
nd styles and places written in the language of art history; they em- Fordism arrived in force. Mass production and consumption
body in themselves the condition they constantly invoke - postmod- transformed the West European economies along North
rnism, the collapse ofhigh culture/low culture distinctions. American lines. There could no longer be the smallest doubt as to
~ - Postmodernism is a term that has been developed in a variety of what kind of society this technology would consolidate: an op-
different contexts - architecture, art history, literary criticism, pressively stable, monolithicallYI industrial, capitalist civilization
French and German philosophies 5 - and refers, therefore, to a was now in place. 7
variety of practices and problems, but this sense of a hrfakdown·bet- The historical moment of postmodernism is also the moment of the
"'L~~l~raJ c~ie~ is, as Jameson suggests, common to th7m birth of rock culture, which is, like television (and unlike film),
all. The argument is that we live at a time when all cultural forms therefore implicated in many postmodern themes: the role of the
draw on the same resources, raid and make mock of each other's multinational communications industry; the development of tech-

l histories, are imp~icated in multi-media tie-ups (the pop video, the

book of the film of the book, the image of the. advertisement of the
image). For most commentators the intermingling and confusion of
forms means the final collapse of traditional (or, rather, in this con-
text, modernist) cultural values, the reduction of art to the vacuous
nologically based leisure activities; the integration of different media
forms; the significance of imagery; the fusion of art theory and sales
technique. Pop songs are the soundtrack of postmodern daily life,
inescapable in lifts and airpor~pubs and restaurants, streets and
shopping centres and sports grounds. We can't, in turn, understand
routines of mechanical production. Only among architects does the post-war history of pop without reference to the impact of
there seem to be much cheerfulness about postmodernist irony and Jameson's 'new kind of society', described as 'new types of con-
eclecticism, much confidence in the postmodern artefact. sumption; planned obsolescence; an ever more rapid rhythm of fash-
Such a negative judgement (and we're dealing here with moder- ion and styling changes; the penetration of advertising, television
1
_lnistcritics of postmodern culture like Jameson rather than postmod- and the media generally; the replacement of the old tension between
ern theorists as such, like Baudrillard) follows from the theorists' in- city and country, center and province, by the suburb and by univer-
itial premise that postmodernist culture reflects a moment in the sal standardisation; the growth of the great networks of superhigh-
\ general development of capitalism rather than a progress within any ways and the arrival of automobile culture.' 8
,Qarticular cultural form (again architecture is a partial exception to
this - postmodern buildings are explained by reference to the 'ex- We'll return to this in chapter 3, but two general points follow. First,
haustion' of modern styles). As Jameson puts it, postmodernism one purpose of this book is to show that critical approaches taken
marks 'a new social and economic moment (or even system), which from fine art analysis (and resonant within p;,tmodern theories) are
has variously been called media society, the "socie;Y ,gf.. the _3?ec- more useful for making sense of popular culture than categories
tacle" (Guy Debord), consumer society (or the "societe de consom- taken from literarycrii:1c1sm. The latter focus on the text when what
~ation"), the "bureaucratic society. of controlled consumption" we have to understand are the _pr.acess.g_ _within which something
6 becomes a text - processes of production and consumption.
(Henri Lefebvre), or "postindustrial society" (Daniel Bell).' Ander-
son is more specific: Second, by focusing on a particular postmodern practice we want
to criticize some of the assumptions of postmodern discourse itself.
It was the Second World War ... which cut off the vitality of The recurring image used by critics is flatness. Dick Hebdige uses the
modernism. After 1945, the old semi-aristocratic or agrarian order metaphor particularly brilliantly in his tour-de-force analysis of The
and its appurtenances was finished, in every country. Bourgeois / Face,'a magazine which goes out of its way every month to blur the
democracy was finally universalised. With that, certain critical line between politics and parody and pastiche; the street, the stage,

4 [s]
 ARTINTO POP • , ARTAND POP

the screen; between purity and daiiger; the mainstream and the seem to be produced by magic. The great theorists of this Marxist
l"margins": to flatten out the world.' But this is a well established
image. Anderson quotes Jameson' s 1971 comment: 'Henceforth, in
jlfmeur approach, Walter Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre, were,
significantly, influenced by surrealism, by the suggestion of an un-
what we may call post-industrial capitalism, the products with conscious reason, a repressed narrative at work in the play of passing
which we are furnished are utterly without depth: their plastic con- images (a landscape brilliantly realized in the film Bladerunner). We
tent is totally incapable of serving as a conductor of psychic energy.' remain, however entertained, with an image of a world beyond
And Jameson has suggested, more recently, that: human control, deprived of any guiding or artistic consciousness,
and while the critical task remains, in Benjamin's terms, to interpret
Cultural production has been driven back inside the mind, within
I such a reality as an illusion (not to duplicate illusion as real) the dif-
the monadic subject; it can no longer look directly out of its real
\jiculties of doing so made him a melancholic (Lefebvre's spirits were
eyes at the real world for the referent but must, as in Plato's cave,
revived by the Situationist International's direct subversion of the
trace its mental images of the world on its confining walls. 9
Spectacle in the 1960s). 11
Even among the architectural writers postmodern style is defined by Flatness, once a style of painting associated with High Modernism
reference to its attention to surface details, and what's common to all (Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko), describes, in the postmodern art
these descriptions is a sense of value being ironed out. In aesthetic world, the collapse of all imagery into the two-dimensional message
terms postmodern culture is essentially valueless, a fragmentary, im- of the street hoarding. Here's a typical New York gallery story from
mediate sensation which can have no grasp on experience. As the 1980s: 'City Arts Workshop and Adopt-a-Building sent artists
Lyotard puts it: to Avenue C to decorat.e a block-long stretch of abandoned build-
ings - all but one belonged to the city. People living in the neigh-
Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture:
bourhood requested that the murals depict the lively little capitalist
one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food
4- ventures they didn't have and still don't: fake newsstand, grocery,
for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in
laundromat, record store.' The city invests not in street enterprise
Tokyo and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter
itself, but in the illusion of street enterprise; art is no longer a critique
for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works. By
ef reality but a substitute. 12
becoming kitsch, art panders to the confusion which reigns in the
Put this interpretation of everyday life back into the equation of
'taste' of the patrons. Artists, gallery owners, critics, and public
postmodern culture with the final triumph of multinational capital
wallow together in the 'anything goes', and the epoch is one of
and you get the full-scale pessimism of c;ontemporary art critics,
slackening. But this realism of the 'anything goes' is in fact that of
whether mainstream like Robert Hughes - 'We are crammed like
money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it only remains possible
battery hens with stimuli, and what seems significant is not the
and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the pro-
quality or the meaning of the messages, but their excess' - or Marx-
fits they yield. 10 ist like Peter Fuller:
, ~Even those writers who in some respects celebrate postmodernism
, retain this sense of contemp;rary life as a passing show. Marshall We are surrounded by more visual images than appeared in any
, Berman, for example, criticizes tne 'visionaries of cultural despair' previous society in history: they comprise a torrential megavisual
J r,or their treatment of modern life as 'uniformly hollow, sterile, flat, tradition (of which the Fine Art traditions constitute only the
l;one dimensional", empty ofhuman possiblities,' but his reading of tiniest component) ofTV, cinema, newsphotography, colour sup-
the signs in the street' has its own form of detachment, as if Berman plements, reproductions of all kinds, but, more especially, the
were marvelling at the richness of city life precisely becaus·e it does giant bill-boards and road posters of commercial advertising. This

6 7
 ART INTO POP

great stream belches down upon us everywhere we go, every

minute of the day.
Sadly, this voluminous mega visual tradition attests to the un-
nerving health of international monopoly capitalism. 13
This is to assume what's being asserted - the co-option of art by
commerce, the superficial response of audiences, the inability of
anyone (save a few, privileged critics) to grasp what is going on. But
if our lives are increasingly dominated by images, by signs, then, as
John A. Walker points out 'artists - being, as it were, specialists in
representation - are in a unique position to call attention to these
).matters.' 14 Postmodern culture makes possible postmodern politics;

'
{ their very involvement in the pop process gives artists new oppor-
,Juniries for cultural intervention. Jamie Reid, artist/designer in resi-
dence to the Sex Pistols (a sample ofhis graphics were bought by the
Victoria and Albert Museum for £1,000 in 1980), wasn't s~y
advertising Pistols products in order to make money: ------ ~
~ -- -·-··- -- ----- --~
It was very much to create images for the street, for newspapers,
for TV, which said something complicated quite simply. I mean,
( you could take an image like the safety-pin through the Queen or
I the Anarchy flag, which to me were expressing the experiences I'd
\ had throughout the previous sixteen years. And I was coming out
\of the period of alternative politics, remember that. 15
From the artist's point of view, from the pop star's, there is always a
problem of audience. Who is being addressed? What for? And the 'An image for the streets'
answers are n~irrelevant to how postmodern culture works.
era) held an important show it called 'Machine Art'. Common
household and industrial objects - stoves, toasters, kitchenware,
Consumption and class chairs, vacuum cleaners, cash registers, laboratory equipment -
were displayed as works of art. 16
--
If one str-and oLpostmodern
-- -- .- culture is-- art-as-conu.n._odity - the
' ,-. - ' -- ~
aesthetic experience has'changed, in Robert Hughes' words, from What follows from t½is is the merger of the visual (and avant-
pseudo-religion to pseudo-possession - the other is commodity-J_S- garde) I_hetoric of art and advertising. Richard Hamilton's painting
--i![!_,the unfolding role in commercial production clclesign (a key Soft Pink Landscape,for example, was derived from a series of colour
component, as we'll see, of the history of British art education). supplement ads for Andrex toilet tissue. Later Hamilton wrote:
Warren Susman notes that:
I was having lunch with friends in New York recently, with
In 1934 The Museum of Modern Art (founded in 1929 and in a Bridget Riley sitting at my side. She teased me about my habitual
sense a product of the questions raised of culture in an industrial plagiarism - even of her work. The plagi,arism is self-confessed,

8 9
0-. I ART INTO POP ART AND POP
\ ·----
_><---__
though I couldn't remember any adoption of Op ideas, except in If one thinks about it, this statement is nonsense, resting, like so
Epiphany and that isn't exactly Bridget's style; I was really confus- much postmodern theory, on a sweeping generalization about 'peo-
ed. It turned out the Andrex ads of girls in the woods that I found ple' for which there is no evidence at all. But, then, it's easy to get
so inspiring were conceived by Bridget Riley when she worked at Baudrillard wrong. What for 'rationalist' readers seems like the
the]. Walter Thompson advertising agency. 17 description of a nightmare is, for him, the reason for celebration:
I people's inability to make sense of the world enables them to refuse
In postmodernist theory the rise of commodity aesthetics is taken to li,ourgeois order. The masses 'scent the simplifying term which is
mean the collapse of'use-value'. But even soft pink Andrex is useful, behind the ideal hegemony of meaning'. Barthes and other modern-
and what's really at issue here is not use-values as such but their ist critics had suggested that mass culture is at the service of a 'regime
significance to consumer choice - is Andrex any more useful than of meaning' which could only be overthrown by the avant-garde.
1/ Bronco (or old newspaper)? Marxist theorists have long tried to dis- Baudrillard sees the masses' very passivity, their •~na1_!!£ulant
tinguish between 'true' and 'false' needs to explain why people want strength of denial', as a gigantic black hole in which bourgeois
non-subsistence goods or favour one package over another, but the myths are swallowed up and made truly meaningless. 19
suggestion now seems to be that commodities have no use-values in The B audrillard account of atomized spectators, tribal bits in some
themselves, as material goods, at all. Our money is increasingly overriding consumer circuit, ignores the historical ways in which
spent on products which are valuable only as signs relating to other consumption is organized, not just in terms of gender, age and class,
signs. This marks what the influential (and opaque) French writer but also along lines of taste and ideology, and once we start thinking

--
.... ~ --
Jean Bauck-illa-r-dcal]sthe 'ecst,!SY.of COl!l!!lunication'--
Bau drill ar d's McLuhanesque semiotic determinism is, in effect, a
historically the precise dating of'postmodernism' becomes difficult.
As Walter Benjamin pointed out, even by 1900 'the mass marketing)
-t new account of the high/low culture collapse, another assertion that of dreams within a class system that prevented their realisation in
once artistic 'autonomy' is denied by market forces then artistic ex- anything but symbolic form was quite obviously a growth in-
perience is impossible. In becoming part of mass communication, dustry'; and in her pioneering study of mass consumption in late-
aesthetic goods are drained of their meaning. What in high art terms nineteenth-century France, Rosalind Williams reveals the origins of
is the highest form of consumption - the attribution of transcendent numerous postmodern concerns. As she points out, the develop-
values to an object, the work of art - becomes within mass culture a ment of the Parisian department store marked the arrival of a society
form of madness. The consumer's purchase or possession of'useless' in which what mattered was not the abundance of consumer goods
goods is now just a moment of regulated exchange, its rules of as such but the ever present visionof such abundance (a vision which,
meaning or, rather, conditions of meaninglessness, determined by a in the twentieth century, has been embodied in images of America).
semiotic system beyond our control. Department stores were organized around displays - in windows,
As Baudrillard puts it himself: under counters, through packaging and advertisement - and by the
end of the century such display could draw on all the magical effects
'f>felectric lighting. V~l languages have been, ever since, central_to
If one thinks about it, people no longer project themselves into
lnass culture (hence our concerns in this book) but, as Williams goes
their objects, with their affects and their representations, their fan-
on to stress, consumption was from the start a form of social (and not
tasies of possession, loss, mourning, jealousy: the psychological
just semiotic) action: '
dimension has in a sense vanished, and even if it can always be
marked out in detail, one feels that it is not really there that things As environments of mass consumption, department stores were,
are being played out. 18 and still are, places where consumers are an audience to be enter-

10 11
 ART INTO POP ART AND POP

tained by commodities, where selling is mingled with amusement, responses are central to the history of British art education in which
we can see, quite clearly, the 'democratic' influence of the arts and
where arousal of free-floating desire is as important as immediate
craft movement on the one hand, the 'elitist' influence ofbohemia on
purchase of particular items. Other examples of such en-
vironments are expositions, trade fairs, amusement parks, and (to the other. Indeed, one of our concerns here is to trace these art school
movements back into pop consumption - Williams' Parisian dan-
cite more contemporary examples) shopping malls and large new
20 dies, for example, would be at home immediately among the poseurs
airports or even sub-way stations.
in the Face or the new pop stars on The Tube, while her democrats
Mass consumption didn't dissolve class differences but gave them now sit behind Red Wedge's trestle tables.
new forms of expression. In France, Williams suggests, the differ- The point is that the aestheticization of commodities, the associa-
ence between bourgeois and mass consumption (which until the end tion ofconsumption with fantasy and dream, doesn't make it
of the Second World War meant middle-class rather than/proletarian' thoughtless (any more than high art is thoughtless) or valueless (any ,,-
spending) was not that the bourgeois consumed more, ~e more than high art is valueless). To choose Andrex over Bronco on
fantasies realized through their consumption were different - the the basis of its packaging does mean making some sort of
bourgeoisie still dreamt of'social status, respectability and security', judgement - and it's how that judgement works that the designers
the new mass consumers proliferated more exotic images of 'luxury and packagers and advertisers themselves spend so much time and
and leisure'. And consumer dreams weren't just a matter of class or money trying to understand.
status expression; they were the subject too of moral and political If the industry is now dominated, in Rachel Bowlby's words, 'by
assessment and choice. In an important passage Williams suggests selling techniques involving the making of beautiful images', and
that: consumer choices now rest on responses to those images, on the ass-
ignment of qualities like grace and beauty to toilet tissue rather than
With the aid of ideal types two distinct consumer styles may be to paintings, then the rise of mass consumption has made possible a
seen emerging in the 1880s and the 1890s: an elitist type and a new profession of skilled image makers, specialists, to quote Richard
democratic one. For all their differences in detail, many, if not Hamilton, 'in the look of things'. The question this raises (and it is
,_
most, of the experiments in consumer models of those decades fall central to the organization of art sdiools) is the relationship between
into one or the other of these categories. Both the elitist and the the traditional fine artist and the contempornycommercial artist.
democratic consumers rebelled against the shortcomings of mass . / The conventional distinction is well expressed by Roy Mc Mullen in
and bourgeois styles of consumption, but in seeking an alternative his survey of twentieth-century arts for the EncyclopaediaBritannica
they moved in opposite directions. Elitist consumers considered in 1968. 'Popular art', to use his term,
themselves a new type of aristocracy, one not of birth but of
spirit - superior individuals who would forge a personal mode of is created (in many instances 'calculated' would be a more accurat,
consumption far above the banalities of the everyday. Democratic term) by artists who differ from the serious, or elite, artists in theil A
consumers sought to make consumption more equal and par- tendency to express not their own views of life, but rather thf ii\
ticipatory. They wanted to rescue everyday consumption from views they think the customer has. Consequently popular art f
banality by raising it to the level of a political and social state- often scarcely art at all; it is often literally meretricious. It makep
ment. 2 1
use of artistic means for non-artistic ends. 22 !\ 0-t
More generally, McMullen distinguishes the 'free' pursuit of the fine
( ~at is fascinating about this is that in describing two modes of
/ consumption Williams is describing two different artisticresponses arts from 'unfree' applied arts like ~esign a;d dh oratio~d to_
domestic, commercial, technological an ot er nonaesthetic
! to the problem of creativity in the mass market place. These
I
--- -
L_ _ _I
12
13
 o..,..,..
ARTINTO POP ARTAND POP
..fQ!lSi.der:ations:._
But this distinction is hard to maintain when com-
!An objet d'art creates a public that has artistic taste and is able to
~rcial conside?ations areaesthetic considerati_?ns. Richard Hamilton,
I enjoy beauty - and the same can be said of any other product. Pro-
in his controversial 1959 discussion of the 'new professional class duction accordingly produces not only an object for the subject,
whose task is to fashion the appearance of objects in everyday use' had
already suggested that 'goods that sell to consumers must show the \- -
but also a subject for the object. 25

hand of the stylist'. His point was that there isn't a fixed consumer Hamilton's (and Marx's) 'shocking' suggestion that consumers can
taste to which every new product must conform: be 'produced' is one of the operational rules of pop music. As Dave
Laing writes, 'musicians are involved at the stage which in other in-
The mass arts, or pop arts, are not popular arts in the old sense of art dustries would be called design: the preparation of a prototype from
arising from the masses. They stem from a professional group with which mass production can begin', and the biggest and most in-

rt a highly developed cultural sensibility. As in any art, the most

valued products will be those which emerge from a strong personal
jconviction and these are often the products which succeed in a
fluential stars (David Bowie is the most obvious example) are
precisely the ones who design their o'wnjans - this is one source of
the tension between art scnoo1-influenced pop musicians and in-
competitive market. 23 ~ustry assumptions about 'giving the public what they want'. 26 ~
L What's startling abom Hamilton's position then, is not that he was
Subsequent art critics have been unimpressed by Hamilton's celebra- wrong, but that he seemed to accept consumer manipulation with
tion of the stylist. As Adrian Forty puts it, there remains a 'crucial such equanimity. What's under threat here is the autonomy - or
distinction' between art and design - 'art objects are usually both con- perhaps the authority -~f consurne;s: their 'free' choice is 'not 'real-
ceived and made by (or under the direction of) one person, the artist, ly' theirs. Hamilton himself put this into perspective in a speech to
whereas this is not so with manufactured goods ... calling industrial the National Union of Teachers' conference on 'Popular Culture
design "art" suggests that designers occupy the principal role in pro- and Personal Responsibility' in 1960 (an occasion where many of the
duction, a misconception which effectively severs most of the con- basic British lines on 1960s mass culture were first spelt out):
nections between design and the processes of society.' But it was the
processes of society which most interested Hamilton too. As he sug- In 1949 I went to the cinema about three times a week, a compul-
gested, the problem of commercial art is not how to subject the artist sion which had little to do with the merits of the films I saw; Rank
to the consumer but how to subject the consumer to the artist: cinemas, at that time, showed a healthy profit. In the late fifties, as
my attendance at the cinema declined, I became aware that my
{It will take longer to breed desire for possession when the objects to thoughtless change of habit had created a crisis in the film in-
1 be possessed have sprung not directly from the subconscious of the dustry, not only was Rank losing money but I had even caused
consumer but from the creative consciousness of an artistic severe cuts in production at major Hollywood studios. A few
cl-
.I
sensibility - but the time-lag will have distinct advantages for in-
I dustry ... [it] ... can be used to design a consumer to the product
weeks after I purchased a camera I read of the fantastic increase in
sales of amateur photographic equipment. lfl buy paperbacks in-
and (s)he can be 'manufactured' during the production span. Then stead of doth-bound books the publishing industry makes a fuss
producers should not feel inhibited, need not be disturbed by about paperbacks taking over. When I bought just one car we had
• doubts about the reception their products may have by an audience a national traffic problem ... 27
they do not trust, the consumer can come from the same drawing
board. 24 The point Hamilton is making is that most of our 'individual' deci-
sions reflect, in fact, collective social forces and this is as true of our
A point Marx made, more abstractly, a century ago: aesthetic tastes as anything else. For most cultural commentators

14 15
 ART INTO POP ARTAND POP

(who write as if they're quite free of such social forces) the in- (o~itof social conditioning, to make ourselves up just like our
dividual's subordination to collective tastes a,nd, in particular, to col- J 'models' on the screen or record player.
lective changes of taste, is a measure of effective commercial 1 What's most important about mass culture is not the drive •
manipulation. But, as Hamilton says (and as dedicated followers of towards standardization, _put the constant call on consumers to
pop fashion we'd emphasize) it doesn't fee/like that. There obviously achieve the 'impossible: 'Be .yourself]' The American historian War-
, is manipulation, but consumers-are qmte-usedto_s_pottin~ ren Susman- comments that if 'one of the things that makes the
resisting it; -at issue he~e are- n6f just 'mindless'· faiitas1e~o~'n=- modern world "modern" is the development of consciousness of
conscious desires --but also self-conscious decisions and cboices. And self', it is also true that what is meant by 'self' shifts as the social
.,,-
these need to be understood (not dismissed) just as much by people structure and its tensions change. The early capitalist/protestant em-
opposing the power of consumer capitalism as by the capitalist sales phasis on 'character' - a self moulded by discipline - has given way
in the twentieth century to the self as 'personality·,, the unique ex-
force itself.
pression of each individual's own, personal qualities. But, as Susman
shows, in the resulting flood of American guides to 'self-
• Subjectivity improvement' the recurring statement is that 'Personality is the
For critics of postmodern culture the central deceit of mass con- quality of being Somebody' - standing out from the crowd. In
sumption is that the sales stress on individual 'free' choice in the Susman's words, 'the social role demanded of all in the new culture
market place - consumption as self-expressi9n - is_ma~tlw- pur- ofpersQnaJ.~t_y.. was ~;;;;r':i~ _..._ -
suit of uniformity~ GOJ:lcsump_tion as a way ofbeingJi_!(e everyone else. Our sense of self, in short, comes from our public presence; wha_t
In practice, though, what's involved is a play of identity and dif- makes consu;;;er g°7>ods desirable is, precisely, that they makepossible
ference of which this simpleminded distinction makes no sense. We thu?ublic display of 'private'-quaJi!ie~. I_!!this- consffmer world the
become who we are - in terms of taste and style and political interest ,stars - film stars in she 15Q2:,,por._~r:s.toda..y_--.are the 'experts' from
and sexual preference - through a whole series of responses to peo- whom we learn our performingtechniques. It is in this management
ple and images, identifying with some, distinguishing ourselves of our 'public' and 'private' selves that the real power of commodi-
from others, and through the interplay of these decisions with our ties is revealed: they produce us as sexed subjects, define masculinity
material circumstances (as blacks or whites, males or females, and femininity, code them along lines of possession and desire.
workers or non-workers). Advertisers intervene within these pro- From the start of industrial capitalism, personal - 'domestic' -
cesses, relating lives to lifestyles, to the accumulation of purchases. consumption was associated with women, and women's consump-
In her study of the origins of French mass consumption, Williams tion was associated with style. As a succession of cotton print
suggests that what matters here is not the desire for the commodity masters explained to the 1840 Select Committee on the Copyright
itselfbut for the way oflife which, advertisers suggest, can be reach- of Designs, it was the variety (rather than quality) of their patterns
ed via the commodi_ty_-which is why, in Baudrillard's term_§, its which was profitable. Did more patterns mean more dresses bought
~~Jue is as a sign. Our argument is that while advertisers use this fan- and worn?
tasy system, they don't exhaust it. People's sense of themselves has
always come from the use of images and symbols (signs of nation, I think it is exceedingly probable, because what is a dress after all?
class and sexuality, for example). How else do politics and religion, It is mere fancy and taste, it is not a mere covering, otherwise we
and art itself, work? Indeed, one argument made by radical pop should not have had any printed dresses at all. It is like paintings,
I musicians (as we'll describe in chapter 4) is that the blatancy of
\ advertisers' attempts to create such images is what allows us to break
there is no reason why a gentleman should possess a painting, but
when he sees _agood one, he wishes to have it. 29
, ____
16 17
 ARTAND POP
ARTINTO POP

~
info.rmally: the interplay of aesthetic and commercial judgement, the
R'he gender division here is familiar - the female concern for dress is
equation of personal expression with mass taste. And sex and gender
'mere fancy', gentlemen are interested in paintings - but this
are irrevocably implicated in these matters - even in straight em-
manufacturer was still philistine enough to equate fashion and art.
Nineteenth-century aesthetic theorists became increasingly con- ,
pirical terms, fashion design tends to be a 'female' subject in art
schools; most of the would-be pop stars are male.
cerned to distinguish the two - to defend art against commerte -
A final point on gender and art, consumption and bohemia. Just as
' while retaining the gendered terms. The implicit contrast of serious
fashion, the sign of women's visual taste, has never been taken
(male) creation and silly (female) fancy remains central to the mass seriously by aestheticians, so women's central consuming activity,
!culture debate. However important women's expenditure to the rise
shopping, has never been taken seriously by sociologists. Men idling
of the mass market, the decisions on which it rests are dismissed as
through the city, ogling passers-by, hanging about on street cor-
_trivial, the results simply of market manipulation. In her study of ners, absorbed in city spectacle, adding to city noise, have long been
)
'proto-industrialization', Maxine Berg notes that: 'Eighteenth-
romanticized in the language of gang and subculture, were dignified
century moralists singled out girls and women in their attacks on
even in the nineteenth century by the term flaneur (rather than the
luxury expenditure, complaining of girls buying silk 30 ribbons, hats, less flattering voyeur).Women on the streets are simply seen as going
jewellery and dresses to suit every change in fashion.' about their business. 'Although consumerism is a central aspect of
Men, in fact, 'equally participated in the luxury consumption of
modernity,' writes Janet Wolff in her examination of the literature of
dress' - Berg cites the skilled calico printers of Bury, who 'displayed
modernism, 'the peculiar characteristics of "the modern" - the
themselves at festivals in breeches, white silk stockings, silver
fleeting, anonymous encounter and the purposeless strolling - do
"'buckles and powdered hair' - but already such a care for clothes
not apply to shopping.' But this literary judgement - gazing out of
I lsc~med 'effeminate'. Fashionable males (beaux and dandies, screen
idols and pop stars) always offend moralists, always suggest an un-
i manly concern for selfish pleasures over public duties, and
cafe windows given the weight of melancholia, gazing into shop
windows dismissed as time-wasting- misses the way in which
shopping, particularly for young women, is, indeed, an idle aesthetic
postmodern critics have mostly gone along with this judgement and
experience, an opportunity for nostalgia, daydream and desire. The
I i:s implicit gender terms - the rise of fashion and frippery measures point is not that men and women have different experiences of the
~e trivialization of art. city, but, rather, that the experiences they share - strolling,
In fact, as Elizabeth Wilson argues, shopping, drinking, chatting - are defined along gender lines.
Fashion is a branch of aesthetics, of the art of modern society. It is Rachel Bowlby suggests that the rise of the consumer society meant,
also a mass pastime, a form of group entertainment, of popular in late nineteenth-century practice, a masculine appeal to women to
I culture. Related as it is to both fine art and popular art, it is a kind buy: 'the making of willing consumers readily fitted into the

~'._ of performance art.

31

_.And..fashion can't be disentaqgl~d from pop music. The history of

- available ideological paradigm of a seduction of women by men, in
which women would be addressed as yielding objects to the power-
ful male subject forrning, and informing them of, their desires.' 32
rock, in Britain at least, is a history of image as well as sound, a
The 'passivity' of consumers is thus derived from an assumption
history of cults and cultures defined by clothes as well_as...songs. about their femininity (an analogy still used by Baudrillard). In pop
Whether in pursuit of authenticity or artifice, romantic truth or
terms this means the appeal of young male stars to even younger
postmodern £!radox and pastic~, !fiUsicians use th<:_language of
C"-- fashion, ,.;;J this m,y b, the point ,t which ,rt schools h,ve'ffiru
female fans, a relationship which has always troubled self-conscious
pop 'artists', but the truth is that the male/female organization of
\- ~mportant musical impact - in college terms, fashion courses
consumer culture is much more complicated than the imagery of
stand formally for what the would-be music-makers are exploring
19
18
 ART INTO POP ART AND POP

passive consumption implies - gender ideologies are cut across by do is celebrate consumption and find truth in the fleeting, flashing
patterns of desire which can't so easily be sexed. Read their fantasies signs of the metropolis. It's as if artists, conscious of their own art-
and 'passive' fans turn out to be erotically active and highly sociable; ifice, still crave for some unambiguous mark of authenticity and are
if they feel strangely possessed by their idols, they take their revenge thus haunted by the idea of realstreet credibility. If consumers seek
in the imaginary possession of them. Sexuality is a matter of im- to transcend the everyday - to' be truly themselves - through fan-
agination for all concerned, the point where to consume (and to be tasies of the extraordinary, there's a significant strand ofbohernian
33 thought that romanticizes normality. Pop music takes its power 1
consumed) seems to confirm us most vividly as individuals.
Mass consumption has an equally significant role in the formation from the consequent meeting of consumer fantasies of difference and
of collective identity: here too the images are put into play among musicians' fantasies of collectivity.
numerous other signs and symbols of collectivity. In August 1976_
the artist and film-maker Derek Jarman wrote a Tour note in his Low theory
diary about the 'gang of King's Road fasfifon anarchists who call
As should be clear by now, the apparently narrow issue of the rela-
Themselves punks'.
tion of rock and art schools is, in fact, a useful way to focus the much
( The music business has conspired with them to create another broader problems of the relationships of art and commerce, high and
( working-class myth as the dole queues grow longer to fuel the low culture, what we've been describing as the postmodern condi-
flames. But in reality the instigators of punk are the same old tion. There is one last point to make about this. Our discussions will,
\. petit-bourgeois art students, who a few months ago were David inevitably, refer to the most sophisticated pop theorists from within
Bowie and Bryan Ferry look-alikes - who've read a little art the worlds of art and music. What relevance do their accounts of
• history and adopted Dadaist typography and bad manners, and what they do have for 'ordinary' consumers? In answering this it's
are now in the business of reproducing a fake street credibility. important to remember the theories of pop
No-one will admit that in a generation brought up on the consen-
sus values of TV there is no longer such a thing as working-class developed out of day-to-day practices of pop itself, out of peo-
ple's need to bring some sort of order and justification to the con-
'culture'. 34
tinuing processes of musical evaluation, choice and commitment
What Jarman seems to mean by this is that there is no longer a - whether such people are musicians, entrepreneurs or fans. The
working-class culture springing directly from some essential work- practice of pop involves, in short, the practice of theorising.
I ing-class experience. It's doubtful that there ever was. Working- Perhaps we should call the results low theory - confused, incon-
class culture has always been the result of the interaction of ex- sistent, full of hyperbole and silence, but still theory, and theory
I perience and myth and what Jarman is really decrying is the new which is compelled by necessity to draw key terms and assump-
source of myths -.the music business, TV and petit-bourgeois art tions from high theory, from the more systematic accounts of art,
students! Jarman's tone of voice - bitter, weary, vaguely left- commerce, pleasure and class that are available. 35
wing- is, in fact, common among the very musicians he's criticiz-
ing, and is, indeed, another aspect of postmodernism - the collapse Aesthetic theories, as Peter Burger puts it, are no longer 'the ex-
of the political certainty of radicals since Marxism or, rather, the clusive domain of philosophers'. There are numerous mediating in-
proletariat lost its authority as the voice of the future. Nineteenth- stitutions between theories of art and everyday exercises of taste -
century Romantic artists were anti-industrial and found truth in the artists themselves, a variety of educational settings, critics,
nature, twentieth-century Romantic socialists were anti-capitalist publicists, etc. 'Everyone,' wrote Gramsci, 'finally, outside his or
and found truth in the working class, but all the New Romantics can her professional activity, carries on some form of intellectual

20 21
 ARTINTO POP ARTAND POP

activity, that is, is a "philosopher", an artist, possesses taste, par- Conclusion

ticipates in a particular conception of the world.' 36 What we want to
suggest is that in the history of rock this conception of the world has In researching this book we've been continually surprised by how
been derived from issues and arguments originating in the particular little interest art writers take in music. Pop critics take the art school
problems of culture and commerce posed by art education. The connection for granted (e\,\enif they say little interesting about it); art
resulting play of high and low theory is sometimes obvious, as in critics, with the exception of John A. Walker, seem to ignore the
this comment from Paul Morley in Blitz: music connection altogether. What this reflects is the continued im-
portance of traditional notions of creative authority: pop stars, it
As Frankie Goes to Hollywood became tabloid stuff, the toilet seems, are simply not recognizable as 'artists'. Even in postmodernist
papers were talking to me, the Mail, the News of the World, the
Express, delighting me with their rotten misquotes, and some

I
journals even began quoting McLuhan and McLaren in connec-
tion with my involvement - a further delight, if only because it is
obvious that Roland Barthes, Saatchi and Saatchi and Jonathan
King are more relevant. 37
And sometimes indirect, as in the recurring importance of art
~~:H~~?!l
,,..,., .._.....
~:~.,.
.................
ITHTHE.BESTWIU
w.

:r.:.:.:-:::::.::;;-r·
-.~1
,:
._._""'-r>·-.....1<,I.......

~~~:.~;:
...t,,,;~
.... ,-~ ........ ,
ii.,...,...,« .

•
I

~
'
~
...
,,.,
.

schools simply as a scene, a place where young people, whether

students there or not, can hang out and learn/fantasize what it means ::.t=t"-~::
~--......... •-.:
._ { '-
,r
to be an artist, a bohemian, a star - this is the art school dance that
~--t
L "·-~(~-~::.'"'
.......
·o...,, .... ...,.;<,b,.Jh ~ '~

5=~';;::_~:
~~~-~;:.~,....
.::.:~.:.-~~:::::~::;:~ ................ ,.,....,,.,..i.;_ci....1.,

~·
~
goes on forever.
What cuts across art training and consumption is the need to be 'a
.
... - ......

~~.. ~l,.~
i.e..............

......
.
..,..,"_,,.......,,.._
, ..... ~ .... 11<
...
-

....~ .....
,,,__ .. - ..
-·--'!::,f.;~
"'--=1~ .... -... \• "'°' •.-· ............ M,..0...,1 ._,,..__._.,_,,~.,.~ •f. W

bit different' (the reason given by one young Coventry woman for ••.,·1~:,j,,.;g_.,...,....,.G
_""-<h ... ,,.._ .... 1
-'••~"'•c:-....
..,.,..,.._..__•,c,d
. ....,._w"' j kl ;· i_~L_I_,:.:
I~..,.~.---.'I '
hanging around the Poly's art school discos), and for more than ,.,.,....,,~,•-••~<>•1""0-
""''"'l ...........
n• r::-
o.i.;.«-1,,, ':}[~ 11,-. :.'·l·•-.··<·BANG!
- ·--.,....
.
thirty years now art school students have been the youth group
---
·,.-.~-

ii=F~-r-~
,.._...,..
J!-_,_
..._..,..,_
....

~
_....,·•··-·-- .. .......
,.-... ,.,. ' ' loc,.-,,hr,........

who've articulated most clearly and influentially what 'difference' ~:;.,;;,;:::_ - ~

..._1o ....................

··----~·"'
-ii-

,,.p..:,_•-1

can mean. Most pop musicians, of course, haven't been to art --

,~
·~ ......
...-u.:_,
.. ....,;~-,1<',lc,
,..,
.. , ... ,..,
"""
u ..
--
schools. They come into the profession from school groups, music
' 7;:,;;~;z;
ThN,,.G.,,IS..,~·~"

training, the traditional local routes of semi-pro club and pub ap- •:,c.•·.'!.~~ ;~:::::-::~~½
I::..•'.~•:. TitoWO'-' .. •\~.:.~::~~'::
~-◄.._._.,_... _n, ..
pearance, each of which backgrounds provides its own account of
what good pop music is and how it works. But they too want to be
different - if only as stars - and so art school ideology interrelates l~
~
with their 'professional' ideas as well as with those of the music
business itself. If there arc, then, occasionally, performing scenes in
which art ideas arc obviously dominant (the Mercer Arts Center in
New York in the early 1970s, St Martin's in the late 1970s, Liver- 'Roland Barthes, Saatchi & Saatchi,Jonathan King'
pool, maybe, in the early 1960s), in day-to-day pop terms, they
swirl about with many others. That they are there anyway is what
we hope to show.

22 23
 ART INTO POP ART AND POP

A discussions of new high art uses of pop cultural forms (and vice what it is to be an artist. The best pop musicians respond to the
versa) Laurie Anderson is hailed as the only crossover act. For ideological problems of their place in a commercial process and so
Walker, 'Anderson's success indicates that the barrier between the make music that resonates for their listeners. If nothing else, then,
realms of fine art and mass culture is not absolute. But this is an ex- we want to bring politics back into discussion of postmodern
ceptional case.' For Hal Foster, she is equally exceptional, a post- culture. Our position is that British pop music is made through
modernist who 'uses the art-historical or pop cultural cliche against struggles and arguments that.can.only be understood by references
itself, in order to decenter the (masculine) subject of such representa- to art school connections. As )\r,i4.:eas Huy~.n has written, the only
tion, to pluralize the social self, to render cultural meanings am- point of adopting the term postmo~ecause 'it operates in a
biguous, indeterminate.' 38 Anderson works for such writers in the field of tension between tradition and innovation, conservation and
way Bruce Springsteen does for champions of rock's blue-collar renewal, mass culture and high art in which the second terms are no
'truth' - she's the star necessary to validate the theory. The point, longer automatically privileged over the first.' 40 We need to rethink
though, is not to find the authentic artist amidst the pop cultural cultural politics by re-examining cultural practice.
dross but to see what happens to art ideas as they are diffused in pop In one of the purpler passages in his study of modernity, Marshall
generally. Berman writes:
'1 The only other place they seem to be recognizable to cultural
critics is in pop videos, which have already generated more high To be modern is to experience personal and social life as a mael-
theoretical words than pop music itself- even Walker asserts that strom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration
and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction:
promo videos 'are presently the vehicles for the most creative ideas
being expressed in the mass media'. This seems an odd conclusion - to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To
from a pop fan's point of view videos represent the imposition of be a modernist iU9 !llake oneself somehow at home in the
some rather tired cliches (from the history of cinema, advertising and maelstrom,_to make its rhythms one's own, to move within its
pornography) onto the music. As Brian Eno put it: 'most vi_g_eo :u.tis currents in search of the forms ofreality, ofbeauty, of freedom, of
lj,ke someone describing, not very well, ;;i_film they saw.' 39 Again it justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows. 41
- . _.., ...,,,,_ -- --
seems that aiCcritics need ·conventional 'visuals' to recognize In London at the start of the 1960s, to be a modernist meant 'total
something as art, even though the history of pop stars' live (and still) devotion to looking and being "cool". Spending practically all your
performing images contains pictures just as imaginative (and artistic) money on clothes and all your after work hours in clubs and dance
as in the average pop video. halls.' This observer, Richard Barnes, 'wasn't a Mod and never even
Both these examples indicate the continued power in art criticism thought of being a Mod. I was at Art School. My involvement with
of the argument that mass media exclude real creativity. The ass- Mods came because my friend from Art School, with whom I shared
umption is that technology/capital logic shapes mass culture which, a flat, played in a group ... ' 42
in turn, provides people with particular sorts of ideological ex-
perience; there is no moment in this chain when artists have the
power to do anything but occasionally (Laurie Anderson) reveal
contradictions. Our assumption, by contrast, is that people embedd-
ed in particular ideologies and experiences shape communication
technologies and thus shape mass culture. This is not to deny the
power of capital but to assert that, nevertheless, cultural producers
can and do make significant decisions, can and do draw on ideas of

24 25