Gerald Bivens

This is a hard question for us because one’s relation to experience is a matter of feeling, and our usable vocabulary is a vocabulary of opinion. The most important effect of the intellectual life of the 30’s and the culture that grew out of it has been to distort and eventually to destroy the emotional and moral content of experience, putting in its place a system of conventionalized "responses." In fact, the chief function of mass culture is to relieve one of the necessity of experiencing one’s life directly. Serious art, too, is separated from reality, for it permits one to contemplate experience without being personally involved; but it is not an evasion: by its very detachment, it opens up new possibilities of understanding and pleasure derivable from reality, and it thus becomes an enrichment of experience.

Mass culture, on the other hand, seeks only to make things easier. It can do this either by moving away from reality and thus offering an “escape,” or by moving so close to reality as to destroy the detachment of art and make it possible for one to see one’s own life as a form of art (this happens in such a novel as Sholem Asch’s East River, for example). Even political discussion becomes a form of entertainment and a defense against experience: by providing a fixed system of moral and political attitudes, it protects us from the shock of experience and conceals our helplessness. The movies, the theater, the books and magazines and newspapers–the whole system of mass culture as creator and purveyor of ideas, sentiments, attitudes, and styles of behavior–all this is what gives our life its form and its meaning. Mass culture is the screen through which we see reality and the mirror in which we see ourselves. Its ultimate tendency is even to supersede reality. (In this sense, as Clement Greenberg remarks, art is more important in our civilization than it has ever been before.)¹