A Philosophy of Mass Art

Carroll is worth reading just for the refreshing contrast he provides to the postmodernism that is endemic in cultural studies. Carroll applies analytic philosophy (ie, basically logic) to what he calls "mass art," and mainly has the same goal as the majority of cultural studies scholars -- he defends "mass art" as being potentially just as worthy as "elite art," both aesthetically and as the topic of analytical inquiry. However, Carroll is emphatically not part of the cultural studies scene -- his arguments have to do with the way "mass art" is, by design, accessible to ALL people, not just certain favored, oppressed groups. Carroll's political agenda then, if you take the position that we all have one, would seem to be a liberal humanism of the Enlightenment, which is not a category I consign to the Evil Other of a binary category! I appreciate Carroll's independence, but his definition of "mass art" is idiosyncratic and not likely to take the field by storm. The definition has 3 parts: 1) the art is a multiple instance, 2) produced and distributed by a mass technology, and 3) is designed (with narrative form, symbolism, intended affect and content) to be accessible with minimum effort by the largest number of people. So Carroll wants to define his "mass" category both in contrast to pre-industrial popular art that was not mass produced, and to avant-garde art that is not designed to appeal to the "mass" of people. This is problematic. While Carroll argues persuasively against MacDonald, Greenberg, Collingwood, Adorno and Horkheimer in his first chapter defending the potential of mass/popular art, he maintains the distinction between high and low art, which he calls instead "avant-garde" and "mass." He attacks what he calls the "Eliminativist" position, which the rest of us know as social constructionism -- boundaries around different cultural fields are socially constructed, and the aesthetic criteria for these boundaries are basically arbitrary other than what has been established by convention. But Carroll's binary distinction here simply will not work in terms of empirical application. The reality of what I think is better considered as a plural, shifting field of "popular culture" (with "popular art" as a subset) is that very few artists/works of art are truly "massively popular." In the mass market, most everything is a niche, from the ska-punk Warped Tour to devotees of Beethoven's string quartets. Robert Christgau, pop music critic for the Village Voice, coined the term "semi-pop" in 1980 to recognize the splintering of the 60s mass market across the 1970s. Perhaps Carroll's thinking is skewed by his expertise in popular films, as mine may be by my greater knowledge of popular music -- there is arguably still a larger, more common audience for Hollywood movies than there is for pop music. But considering popular culture as a whole, I don't find Carroll persuasive. Carroll calls his definition a "theory." Perhap