In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the futu...re which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future--with a shopping center for twice the population, with a school building already built, with churches constructed, with parks and playgrounds and swimming pools. These were as essential to building a suburb as the prematurely grand hotel had been to building a city in the wilderness. In large developments where the developer had a plan, and even in the smaller developments, there was a new kind of paternalism: not the quasi-feudal paternalism of the company town, nor the paternalism of the utopian ideologue. This new kind of paternalism was fostered by the American talent for organization, by the rising twentieth century American standard of living, and by the American genius for mass production. It was the paternalism of the market place. The suburban developer, unlike the small-town booster, seldom intended to live in the community he was building. For him community was a commodity, a product to be sold at a profit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man,... and this standardization is called equality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Arguments too stale to mention 'Gainst American invention... Most of all the mass production Destined to prove our destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The age of independent travel is drawing to an end," said E.M. Forster back in 1920, when it had been increasingly clear for deca...des that the mass production inevitable in the late industrial age had generated its own travel-spawn, tourism, which is to travel as plastic is to wood. If travel is mysterious, even miraculous, and often lonely and frightening, tourism is commonsensical, utilitarian, safe, and social, "that gregarious passion," the traveler Patrick Leigh Fermor calls it, "which destroys the object of its love." Not self-directed but externally enticed, as a tourist you go not where your own curiosity beckons but where the industry decrees you shall go. Tourism soothes, shielding you from the shocks of novelty and menace, confirming your prior view of the world rather than shaking it up. It obliges you not just to behold conventional things but to behold them in the approved conventional way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits... depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass s...tate of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Folk art" signifies the poetical, musical, and pictorial activities of those strata of the population which are uneducated and no...t urbanized or industrialized. It is of the essence of this art that those who keep it in being are not only passively receptive, but normally are creative participants in the artistic activities, and yet do not stand out as individuals or claim any personal authorship of the productions. "Popular art" on the other hand is to be understood as artistic or quasi-artistic production for the demand of a half-educated public, generally urban and inclined to mass-behavior. In folk art, producers and consumers are hardly distinguished, and the boundary between them is always fluid; in the case of popular art, we find on the contrary an artistically uncreative, completely passive public, and professional production of artistic goods strictly in response to the demand for them. It is indeed a striking fact that folk art, especially folk-poetry, emerges from the ranks of those who enjoy it, whereas popular songs--the street ballads and popular "hits"Mderive from professionals belonging to and spir itually dependent upon the upper classes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dangers of mass culture are much easier to define than the ideals. The foremost one, which may negate all the ideals, is an ov...erpowering narcotic effect, relaxing the tired mind and tranquilizing the anxious. Genuine art is demanding and difficult, often unpleasant, nagging at the mind and stretching the nerves taut. So much of mass culture envelops the audience in a warm bath, making no demands except that we all glow with pleasure and comfort. It is this that may negate the range of possibility (the bath is warmer at the shallow end), keep taste static or even deteriorate it a little, muffle the few critical and ironic sounds being made. That premature cultural critic Homer knew all about this effect, at various times calling it Lotus Eaters, Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens, and he just barely got our hero through intact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »