1.
We are riding a tidal wave of mass art, and that is something new. Just a click away are countless films and TV shows, stand-up routines, and pop albums. The Netflix scroll is infinite. While mass art has been around for hundreds of years—it got going with the printing press—the last twenty years have seen a huge increase, and now mass art is a main motor of the history of art and culture. But is mass art a big deal philosophically? Is it a philosophically interesting category, like, say, painting, and unlike art made by someone between 5’ 3” and 5’ 11”?
Noel Carroll is a good person to ask. He wrote a book about the philosophy of horror, and tosses around enough examples that it’s clear he loves mass art—though I hesitate to put too much trust in someone who calls “Rock and Roll Music” a Beatles song (it’s a Chuck Berry song, the Beatles’ recording is an—inferior—cover). Also, Carroll published his book in 1998, when mass art was puny. We were still using dial-up modems, for goodness sake. (Side note: in the 90s I had a friend who figured out how to whistle into his phone and trick the server into thinking he was a modem; again the march of technology crushes the human creative spark.) In 1992 Bruce Springsteen sang about “57 Channels (and Nothin’ on),” 57 then being a ridiculous number of choices; if tomorrow Netflix limited its selection to 57, well, someone would probably pen a letter of complaint. But mass art was massive enough even in 1998 that the passage of time has not made Carroll’s book irrelevant.
So, we should start at the beginning: what is mass art?
2.
Here is Carroll’s definition:
X is a mass artwork if and only if
X is a multiple instance or type of artwork;
X was produced and distributed by a mass technology;
X was intentionally designed to gravitate, in its structural choices (for example, its narrative forms, symbolism, intended affect, and even its content), toward those choices that promise accessibility with minimum effort, virtually on first contact, for the largest number of untutored (or relatively untutored) audiences.
That’s a lot to chew on so let’s cut it into smaller pieces.
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