High Art is Not Stealing Your Girlfriend

So why all the distrust?

Getting a laugh is not the same as being funny, just as getting applause does not mean you have created something great.  Yet in our increasingly end-based consumer culture, these distinctions are beginning to blur as never before.

Can you imagine an age of media without advertisements?  America sure couldn’t.  Right from the get-go in the 1920′s, radio was filled with deeply embedded commercials, from delicious Chesterfields to less-delicious Ovaltine.  In the 50′s and 60′s, with the popularization of television, the keen Madison Avenue minds realized something obvious, yet profound: the younger the customer you hooked to your product, the more years you would have access to their wallet.  You don’t advertise to a dying man.

As a direct result of this shifting focus towards youth, young people were thenceforth pandered to ceaselessly, and the culture we had inherited from our forebearers dating back to the motherland — a culture which valued age, wisdom and experience — was subverted to favor the young, beautiful and clueless.  In an era-defining shift, the most potent forces of American culture were now oriented almost single-mindedly towards youth.  In concert with the burgeoning self-esteem movement, young people were made to feel like the center of the universe.  Topol and Anacin commercials didn’t have to go home, but they couldn’t stay in primetime.

By the 1980′s, children’s programming had finally made the bold, inevitable move to 30-minute commercials.  Masters of the Universe, Voltron, Robotech, Thundercats, My Little Pony — all of them engrossing, entrancing to 80′s kids.  Animation which had begun 70 years prior as the extraordinary work of American artists, had been replaced by mass-produced, off-model schlock designed not to be great or to bring pure joy, but merely to entertain.  As long as you could hypnotize a 12 year-old for 30 minutes, you could sell toys, and that meant you were in business.  If you are now of a certain age, you look back on those Saturday mornings with radiating joy, but with your older, wiser, more experienced (and therefore unappreciated) eye, you see it for what it was: a vast winking of hoods.

A watershed moment came in 1986, though we wouldn’t know it until many years later.  Nintendo of Japan released the sequel to what would go on to become the most important video game of its time: Super Mario Brothers.  The new game was not a sequel in the customary sense; it did not place our hero in a novel new context, nor did it introduce brand-expanding new characters.  Its main focus as a sequel — and this seems to have been unique in video game history — was to make the game more difficult.  Not just more difficult, but more clever, more ingenious, more challenging, more rewarding.  Evil mushrooms, deadly gales, pixel-perfect jumps, mazes, tricks, it was a fiasco of exuberant hair-pulling representing the pinnacle of game design.  Nintendo cast its eye across the Pacific, and contemplated what our youth culture had become, and they came to something of a staggering conclusion: we weren’t ready for it.

Us, the youth of the United States of America … could not, in the eyes of Japan, handle their latest video game.  And I think they were wrong.  If we could spend hour after hour defusing a bomb-rigged dam in TMNT, and day after day weaving Battletoad jetbikes through a cavern of white monoliths, we would have been happy to master the Mario game, even if it took months — which it would.  Beating it would have become the ultimate badge of Nintendo honor. But you cannot fault Nintendo for seeing us as feckless, impatient, spoiled little imbeciles who couldn’t handle a poison mushroom.  After all, that’s how our own country was treating us: as though we were simply too shallow to appreciate anything beyond entertainment.  In Nintendo’s eyes, American youth regarded Mario as an arm-waving clown who could occupy us for a few afternoons before we once again got bored and shiftless and began pissing off our moms and tormenting our smaller siblings with strange pseudo-weapons of dubious efficacy made of rubber bands and tinker toys (eyes beware).

So they sent us a different game instead, and called it Super Mario Brothers 2.  It is not a bad game — in fact it is a wonderfully weird and creepy game — but it is many, many times easier, less ingenious, and less rewarding than the game Japan got. I bought it the day it came out, and by 4am it was done.  I was entertained, but when Lost Levels came out, I was … astonished.  This was the pinnacle of platform game design we were promised.  This was the title that elevated gameplay to an art.  But in the eyes of the world, American youth was not up to the challenge.

Were they wrong?  Had they indeed underestimated the American 12 year-old, or was their suspicion that we were culturally impoverished family-room slugs on point?

Or had television, movies and “educators” managed to convince us that as American youth we were so special, so effulgent and enviable, that all things should have to meet us at our level, and not the other way around?  We may not be able to answer for how we were 25 years ago, but we know what American youth has since become, and we are now seeing the genuine fruits of popular media’s efforts.  If you have children yourself, perform the following experiment: sit your small ones in front of the original Super Mario Brothers, and see how long they last before denouncing it as intolerably frustrating and difficult.  They won’t have too much of a problem with the graphics — retro is perfectly hip right now — but the demands of even this easier Mario game will still be too much.  In terms of overall difficulty, the original Super Mario Brothers makes Super Mario Galaxy seem like a game of arranging one potato by size.

Now it is 2010.  Rather than striving to push the video game industry forward as Nintendo did in 1985 with Super Mario Brothers, or the motion picture industry did with Bonnie and Clyde, or the television industry did with M*A*S*H, we still nurture an unbending orientation towards youth.  Not just youth, but stupid youth; dim, obstinate, lazy youth who enjoy — due in part to the media’s unyielding Sauron-like eye trained like a laser upon everything young people do and say — a sense of entitlement that necessarily corrupts.  It is no longer acceptable to simply create something great and trust in the curiosity and enthusiasm of young people.  Instead, we need to bring art down to their level, handfeeding it to them in bite-sized, easily-recognizable chunks.  We need motion pictures like Kick-Ass: disposable, nearly formless tarballs of buzzwords and laugh cues that reinforce our kids’ sense that their unwise, inexperienced culture — immaculately cultivated by Microsoft, Apple and Disney — is the zenith of civilization.

It is no surprise that the value of “high” art — that is to say, art which exists purely as an expression of human existence — finds little purchase in American culture, and indeed inspires scorn.  The new art then, is entertainment.  Functional efforts which serve to pass the afternoons of twitchy, increasingly obese, subnormal youths.  More alarming has been the gradual upsell on this idea that entertainment for grown-ups need aspire no higher than entertainment for kids.  Kick-Ass was rated R, and Torchlight is, amazingly, played by grown adults.  Yet these games and movies liberally apply juvenile cues and tropes designed simply to hit the right buttons; to get the laugh, to get the grin, to get the good review and word-of-mouth without actually being funny, creative or laudable.  That is the real working-man’s art — purely functional, formulaic enough that any hack can mash it together, and unchallenging enough to preserve the fragile self-esteem of the American adult. We don’t want anyone getting depressed over Lakitu’s tenacious antagonism, after all.

Maybe it is inevitable that entertainment will subsume art in mainstream culture in the future.  Maybe high art really is moribund, and popular media needn’t learn or borrow from its integrity.  It is certain though, that this is a process which needs no hastening. There are many, many keen Madison Avenue sharpshooters and artistic teetotalers whose job it is to ensure that entertainment thrives.  But those among us who value art which does not necessarily sell action figures would do well to fortify the camp of the underdog — pure art, that which softens the singular blow of mortality, and allows a dignity for human existence that young, inexperienced American 12 year-olds could not fathom.  High art does not threaten us, so we should not threaten it.