The Lady has done it again. With the August 2013 release of her single, “Applause,” Lady Gaga addressed what many celebrities imply but fail to explicitly convey: that behind the façade of celeb immortality lies a fragile dependence upon audience reception. Gaga described such a phenomenon on her Twitter feed
“’Applause’ is a very meaningful song to me, because it addresses what many think of ‘celebrities’ today, that we ‘do it’ for the attention. But some of us are ‘artists’ in this group called ‘celebrity,’ & what we create doesn’t live on unless theres [sic] an audience to remember it.”
But much is troubling about this functionalist approach to, and attitude towards, art. In revolving their work around the commercial profit that stems from aesthetic shock value, Gaga and her pop culture contemporaries do not democratize and popularize high art; rather, they commercialize and pervert it. The rise of what I would call “mass-produced art,” paired with a decline in “art for art’s sake,” reflects a troubling cultural trend in which members of society are striving towards indicators of success rather than towards genuine artistic realization and fulfillment. Given the fountain of problems emerging from a profit-based model of art in the United States, it may well be time to re-consider implementation of government policies to further subsidize the arts.
The Canon of Kitsch
There are surprising parallels between Gaga’s career or Miley Cyrus’s post-Hannah Montana coming-out, and the career of early 20th century composer Igor Stravinsky. Much can be illuminated from this comparison, chiefly because the careers of these artists have come to be defined by shock value.
The 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, in which a young girl dances herself to death during a sacrificial ritual, is probably one of the most shocking cultural experiences popularly narrated. American writer Carl Van Vechten described the impact on audience members of the unusually angular, contorted choreography and repetitive, ritualistic music as such:
“The intense excitement under which [the young man seated behind me] was laboring betrayed itself when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time.” In fact, the first performance of Rite was never brought to completion as audience members rioted the theatre.
Though Gaga concert-goers may be hard-pressed to beat upon the heads of their colleagues, the musicological similarities between Stravinsky and Gaga have sobering implications for contemporary celebrities’ cultural impact. Vaslav Njinsky, who choreographed Stravinsky’s Rite, himself stated that it was to be “danced only by the corps de ballet, for it is a thing of concrete masses, not of individual effects.” This, combined with the reflexive dance moves which a contemporary French writer, G. de Pawlowski, described as “automatism,” and the persistent, satiating rhythms, leads to a disturbing elimination of the emotional and human qualities of music.
Stravinsky’s style and attitude have influenced at least a few modern hits. For instance, Beyoncé’s “Countdown” imitated heavily the choreography of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, often cited as a modern Stravinsky. Art in this style ultimately tends to avoid genuine self-expression in favor of collectivist art.
If you disagree with me, I beg you to contemplate whether you appreciate “We Can’t Stop” for its aesthetic sensitivity—of which it has little—or for its collective attraction and inescapable repetition. To further this, we enjoy choreographers like Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker not because her choreography reveals some humanitarian aspect to art—it doesn’t—but rather because of its hypnotic, groupthink nature.
Bhesham Sharma posits in his Music and Culture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that the collectivist music and art like Stravinsky’s created a sense of social superiority; namely, people felt superior by buying into this very different, collective art simply because it was avant garde. Now that artists like Gaga have diffused this type of art to the masses, the sense of social superiority is diminished, but the disconnect remains between human and art formed by Stravinsky-esque works.
Artistic reproduction of the kind we see in contemporary music hits, with all-too-recognizable rhythmic repetitions that can hardly be called motifs, does, in German critic Walter Benjamin’s words, “sterilize emotions.” In a world where media traffic is high, memes abound, and Buzzfeed is the daily news, consumers virtually crowd together for automatic aesthetic gratification. And because today’s direction of art depends on audience reception, our overwhelming tendencies for the kind of art that Stravinsky may have unintentionally espoused, the canon of kitsch, is harming our cultural climate.
Profit versus Fulfillment
This is not to say that top hits do not have their podium in our cultural landscape or that Stravinsky-derived art should be banished (my FOP group would be quick to point out my affinity for “We Can’t Stop”). Banishing any type of art would be a hypocritical and dangerous measure in a democratic artistic context. Neither do I mean to say that all shocking art has a negative value; Picasso was shocking, but also, I think, moving and humanitarian. But while the party culture nourished by such music is by nature a collective one, I worry that cultural representation of humanitarian contemporary art is lacking.
The difference between artists like Picasso and artists like Gaga is that while Picasso just happened to shock as a by-product of genuine artistic progress, oftentimes celebrity culture shocks for the sake of audience reaction and profit.
More recently, the dependence upon audience reception has exacerbated the gap between the desire to create art and having the means to create it. Increasingly, the easiest way for artists to gain the means to create art is to shun meaningful art for commercial art. Celebrity artists have aspired to audience reception, a mere indicator of artistic success, as opposed to artistic fulfillment.
Such an art culture has developed parallels with the social and political climate in compelling ways. The culture of success and immediate gratification experienced by artists like Gaga is a mirror of the tendencies in our world to strive for mere and meaningless indicators of success, e.g. “I want to get into Harvard,” rather than engaging in truly fulfilling goals.
Even apropos of the political climate, politicians have favored collective-ness, aka partisanship, over substantive policy reform. During a John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on government shutdown held on October 2, 2013, Harvard Kennedy School Senior Lecturer David C. King commented that as members of the political community, “We are tribalized.” The relationship between profit and art should not be causal. In democratic aesthetics, majority must not be the rule; when self-expression is endangered by the threat of commercial tendencie, our canon of contemporary art becomes over-specialized and homogenous. Despite the partisanship that sickens Congress today, it would appeal to both parties to further subsidize the arts as a way to diversify the artistic pool. Ultimately, it is our responsibility to create art that expands, illuminates, and enlightens. We have every Rite.