Thanks very much for your reply. A couple of specific responses:
On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 7:54 PM, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
> 1) This was not about spreading the wealth
>
> 2) It was much more about a nouveau world ruling class decking itself out in
> what it considered the appropriate high cultural trappings
>
> 3) It was more complicated than that.
> But before saying a few words about that, I think we should note in passing
> that (1) severs it from Varoufakis's argument. It was, in part, a side
> effect of America being suddenly much richer and more powerful. But it
> wasn't about finding creative solutions to the the economic recycling
> problems that derived therefrom, which is his beat.
I'm not sure I completely understand your your statement about "severing." I do know that the US was hardly altruistic in its actions. What interests me about Varoufakis' "Grand Plan" thesis is its global scope: political economy that assigns very general roles to the US, Europe, etc. This isn't my area of expertise, however, so perhaps I have things all confused.
> But as I'm sure you knew, it really took off in the 1940s
> and 1950s with the idea that the world's capital center of modern art had
> moved from Paris to New York (to be near the new world centers of finance
> and military power.
Well, the idea took off in the US in the 1940s courtesy Clement Greenberg, but the first real acknowledgement came with Bobby Rauschenberg's win at the Venice Biennale in 1964, and even then, the Parisians claimed that the award had been bought. So that European metropolis didn't go down without a long fight.
> The historical roots of this are wide and fascinating and kind of unique to
> the US (at least when compared with Europe). But I think it's a fair
> assertion that the feeling that this was possible, and the feeling that it
> was necessary, crested in the 1950s with the rise of television and the rise
> of the Mass Culture thesis. And it was widely shared across the political
> spectrum.
Well in France, Malraux and Biassini had started on their Maisons de Culture project well before any of this gained much currency in the US. Germany was a different story. I have a feeling that the relationship between high and low art, and interest in Modernism, was very different there and didn't pose the same problems found in American and France.
Thanks for mentioning TV. UNESCO was very involved in figuring out the value of television on a global scale during the 1950s, although its perspective was not the same as our commercial networks. I'd be curious to hear more about how there was "wide sharing across the political spectrum."
What interests me, though is not so much the specifics of Lenny and Jackie at this point, but given Varoufakis' "Grand Plan," how to connect it in some detail to domestic cultural phenomena.
There was apparently a re-investment in Europe and Japan that also manifested itself as a re-investment in the US. It took the form of government policy through Kennedy's "New Frontier" mandate.
Kennedy's policies addressed themselves to the material and cultural well-being of US citizens, and had both mass and elite components. This was a big change from the Eisenhower administration, and I don't understand how it came about. It seems that if Eisenhower could have served another term, then his "Era" would simply have continued as well. So is it simply a matter of the Democrats coming back into power after 8 years? If so, what accounts for the differences between the Truman administration and Kennedy's? Different moment in the Cold War? Retirement of Roosevelt's people and "new blood" coming on board?
There's been a lot of study of the "Cultural Cold War," as you mention in your email, but this tends to focus on competition for prestige in Europe, and elite arts. The Byrne-Blum act that I mentioned is a perfect example of US government policy efforts in the name of Hollywood film culture. I assume that underlying the "Kitchen Debate" was government support for creating a market for Raymond Loewy-designed appliances in Europe. So not everything was about Pollock and Abstract Expressionism.
Clearly there were aspects of this addressed to US businesses for the American market. The Fortune essay I cited suggests that the cultural aspirations of US consumers would be critical to business survival in the 1960s. Where is the Cultural Studies work in this area? I have some pretty good data about how Regional Theater dovetailed with Urban Renewal and Historic Preservation, but I haven't seen much other evidence of a connection between Art and Business. Perhaps Camelot was just too brief a time for these linkages to emerge very clearly.
Best wishes, Charles