A Hegemonia Americana na Cultura no Pós-Guerra

Resenha do livro de Louis Menand, The Free World, escrita por Mark Greif na The Atlantic:

Menand is notably excellent on how commercial, regulatory, and technological changes determined which kinds of artwork made it to the public. His analysis helps demystify trends in commercial forms like film and pop music, especially when they otherwise seemed to run against the grain of pure profit. “Foreign film” in America in the ’50s and ’60s—when independent art cinemas emerged, showing imports such as work by Ingmar Bergman and the French New Wave—proves to have been energized by a successful federal-government antitrust action against the monopolistic Hollywood studios. So, too, with the anarchic spirit of the new popular music. “Where did rock ’n’ roll come from?” Menand wonders. He answers that it was “the by-product of a number of unrelated developments in the American music business” that redirected sales to teenagers, and also the result of new radio-station competition, the partial racial desegregation of the music charts, and the arrival of 200-disc jukeboxes.

The idea of a “culture industry”—originally an oxymoron coined in 1947 to sum up the danger facing art (for how could personal culture be churned out on an industrial model?)—is used unironically by Menand to name the vastly scaled-up production and consumption of all artistic experience. “The culture industries, as they expanded, absorbed and commercialized independent and offbeat culture-makers, and the university, as it expanded, swallowed up the worlds of creative writing and dissident political opinion.” With his eye on this process, we miss out on artists and thinkers who dug deep and stayed home, who produced as hermits or eccentrics or introverted students of their art. And I wondered about rival art forms and streams, such as jazz from 1945 to 1970. Bop, post-bop, and free jazz evolved an American art music that was the real successor to Debussy, Schoenberg, and Bartók (never mind John Cage). It gained in artistic complexity and superiority even as it decreased in market share.