The moment that really concerns me, though, is the reversal of official cultural attitudes in the US during the Kennedy administration. Obviously, some of this has to do with the promotion of cultural consumption by the likes of Fortune magazine, and Jacqueline Kennedy's presence in the White House, but I still haven't encountered any study attempting to account for why this reversal happened, and happened so sharply.
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I am not sure I understand what reversal you are talking about, but I'll guess. Jacqueline Kennedy was presented the Mona Lisa by Andre Malraux, cultural minister of France. It was a symbolic gesture that the US had become the cultural center of the West, a profound change of cultural power, from France (Europe in general) to the US.
This hit pretty much at the same time I started college. I'd call the effect the europeanization of America in the sense that it seemed that overnight, european arts, literature, sciences were suddenly available in relatively cheap reproductions via the paperback and newer translations. This was striking in modern art history were pre-WWII painting was just about all European and post-WWII was just about all American painting and jazz. Also there was a math-science transition. Modern physics and math were European inventions. Modernity itself was a Euro creation that was brought to the US.
But this transition had been building for a long time, at least since the 1930s. Just about all the European intellectual elite came to the US to get out of the Nazi horrors. By 1960 their impact was felt at my lowly student level. I've been fascinated with this transition ever since.
Thinking back, the cultural and scientific hegemony of the US during the post-WWII period was something of an illusion. What happened was the near complete cultural and scientific destruction of Europe where its exiles moved here for safety and brought their worlds of modernity with them.
``When patterns of taste are dictated by purely commercial considerations, one argument goes, this capacity is stunted, and nearly all taste must conform to the average. Creative talent is diverted from writing novels or composing sonatas into such tasks as confecting advertising slogans; and intellects that are capable of unlocking secrets of the universe are diverted into such pursuits as designing better cigarette-making machinery.''
The use of the word taste is itself a trivialization or commerical idea. Taste isn't the issue. The central concept is a change in world view.
The problem with Euro elite culture was capitalist commerical production had no use for it. It was expensive to reproduce and had a very limited market in the US. Most publishers didn't work like Gallimard for example who essentially subsidized Camus and others. A very limited group of wealthy gallery owners in NYC could afford to subsidize some of the AE school. Peggy Guggenheim and later Leo Castelli were examples.
Warhol turned himself into an all american product. The business of art is business. This was a complete and thorough going rejection of any of those Euro pretentions toward intellectualism, sensibility, or content. With Warhol there was literally and figuratively nothing there. He was commerical banality all the way down. The essential method was to subcontract all that messy hand work out. Warhol got somebody else to do the work. This is pretty much how advertizing agencies work.
Since there was no place to go and get paid to write or paint, post-war generations turned to academia. But academic life was somehow sterile. Mass production education ruled by business managers systematically elimentated what little life there might have been.
I barely managed to get some sense of arts at Northridge when they hired some very creative people by accident. I came up here and got just as brief a glimpse in the grad student studios where I could hang out, work, and watch other students work. That only lasted a year because the administration tore down these buildings and put up another building.
CG