Culture War
Rip Cronk
Chapter 9
New Cultural Paradigm: Community Art at the End of the Culture War
Pat Buchanan brought culture wars to the American stage when he gave his so-called “Culture War” speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. The right wing rhetoric of culture war pitted traditional conservative values against progressive liberal values. As a key strategy of the attack, Republican politicians positioned themselves as speaking for the interests of religion and condemned certain liberal policies as evidence of moral decay; supporting the rights of homosexuals, freedom of choice on abortion rights and the separation of church and state. Fear tactics and right wing hate radio broadcasts rallied middle America along with a motley crew of religious zealots, neofascists and bigots to flock to the voting booths in support of retrogressive and sometimes prejudicial policies. Reactionary conservative propaganda promised to restore traditional values lost to a flood of influences in the late twentieth century. These influences include the rise of multiculturalism and radical feminism, the postmodern disenfranchisement of occidental philosophy and religion, the globalization of economic markets and the rise of corporate capitalism.
In 2008, the conservative movement was hoist with its own petard. The economic downturn precipitated by the greed of deregulation in the banking industry appears destined to develop into a fullblown depression. During the final months of the past presidential election campaign, Republican tactics took the low road and emphasized the divisive rhetoric of the culture war debate in a desperate attempt to attract voters. After losing the election by a substantial electoral count, the party will be forced to rethink and regroup. Conservative politicians, survivalists all, will adjust their political views toward a more centrist position. The republican party had maintained control of the democratic process with its coalition of right wing extremists hiding behind a facade of Christian values. This voting block of fanatics will soon become isolated and their coalition disbanded, or at least disassociated from the mainstream. The may be the felling blow for the current manifestation of the culture war debate as the defining division in American culture and politics. The current global economic downturn will be the impetus for a dramatic shift in the alignments of political and cultural communities.
Culture war was waged by conservative politicians to demonize the liberal movement as the object of public rancor. But no political party can take responsibly for the philosophic and social transformations that were taking place, and short of subverting the constitution (Bush tried), there was no preventing the changes from occurring. While the munitions of culture war, that tide of disorienting influences fueling the reactionary call to arms, brought unwanted changes in the lives of conservative constituents, the discord created by cultural war propaganda caused a debilitation of core humanitarian values throughout society. In addition, political pressure to conform to the consumer model even after the economy started its freefall, and media coverage of the ever-mounting problem of corporate and political graft, has left the citizenry distrusting of the intentions of government officials and the capitalist oligarchy.
The divisive rhetoric of the culture war left morally fractured combatants across America. As a community muralist who has spent a lot of time on the street interacting with all segments of society, let me state emphatically, there is no lack of moral values -- everyone has their own sense of right and wrong. As a group, indigents living on the street have a strong sense of brotherhood and are protective of cultural features in their neighborhood. The indigents’ values are inconsistent with those of the bourgeoisie or the working class. The ethical codes in society are not uniform, not between groups nor within them. Many subcultures and economic classes exist in the same city space, with the ideals of one seeming foreign to the next. Shared constitutional rights and privileges and shared city streets, commerce and cultural attractions, provide common ground. While cultural diversity is part of the American experience, there has always been a common set of underlying humanitarian ideals and value systems to unite our society as a nation. The divisive nature of the culture war has eroded these core values. In the current fractious social environment, the relationship between personal ethics and social responsibility is out of balance toward self-interest at the expense of the collective. This imbalance appears to be consistent across the spectrum of social classes and subcultures in America.
The cultural debate was the cover story for a more systemic problem. During the Bush administration, the controlling political and corporate economic systems became increasingly corrupt while all the time proclaiming themselves to be protectors of the traditional way of life; greed and duplicity were rampant. The citizenry knew their leaders could not be trusted and this became the status quo until the financial collapse of 2008. As a consequence, every segment of society has drawn back from social morality and the ethics of fair play. Political and corporate initiatives were rife with deceit from the top down: the patriarchy took the money and ran. The rich kept getting richer and the poor had fewer alternatives. What is left of middle and working classes has retreated into a guarded self-first survival ethic, a kind of personal protectionism. This does not bode well for government programs intending to legislate morality (and buying habits) through social and cultural programs. Society finds itself in the awkward position where humanitarian values can only be generated at a local level with grassroots programs independent of government and corporate funding sources that carry the stigma of deceit.
The relevant cultural opposition is no longer between left and right political views, it is between national (global) and local, between corporate and entrepreneurial capitalism, between social programs legislated by agencies out of touch with the particulars of the community versus programs developed within the community. In art, the distinction is between government or corporate sponsored public art promoting mainstream priorities and community oriented art projects expressing local issues. This cultural debate is not new, but it will become more significant as we move into a new cultural paradigm.
The change in alliance has already occurred. Anything that hints of the directives of the oligarchy at the expense of values generated from within the community will meet resistance. Grassroots community art projects are more likely to be received without prejudice. Government or corporate sponsored culture such as public sculptures by prominent artists will still be appreciated in upper class surroundings, which is where they belong; raising property values and proclaiming the prestige of the surrounding community. For the rest of society, as long as public art is community based, the source of funding is not important unless the artist is awarded an exorbitant stipend. If the artist is paid a large sum of money to install art in an economically depressed community, the artist’s motives will be suspect and the project considered a waste of time and resources by the community. In the current situation, public disdain for art projects has little to do with the quality of the art. The financially disadvantaged are aware they suffer the oppression of self-interested policies of the ruling class. The arrogance is galling, the hypocrisy transparent. How can philanthropy between classes not be met with mistrust in a social environment fragmented by culture wars?
While influences responsible for bringing about structural changes in society are broad based, culture war tactics backfired during the past administration to become a contributing factor in the realignment of society from a traditional majority culture to a conglomerate of coexisting subcultures. This structural transformation can be attributed at least in part to public distrust for the directives of the ruling class and the inequities of right wing political policies. Mass culture is now composed of an array of equally entitled subcultures connected through a ubiquitous techno-social environment of camera phones, social networking on the internet and cable television channels dedicated to specific audiences.
Members of the middle and working classes, disenchanted by the duplicity of mainstream culture, sought out cultural groups with similar interests, dress codes and behaviors. These are subcultures, passionate in their defining beliefs and their desire not to be associated with the majority culture. Previously marginalized subcultures stand together in defiance of the ghost of a majority that no longer exists. The top and bottom of the faltering order of economic classes have been reduced to subcultures in their own right. While they still have economic clout, the rich have been dethroned from the apex of the social order. In the new cultural paradigm, minority cultures are not assimilated by a dominant majority, and thrive as autonomous entities. The majority culture, with its loss of authority in the realignment of society, has become little more than another channel on the television dial. (see “Community Art and the Changing Cultural Paradigm in America”).
Each subculture (community, minority) is in continual transformation from the influence of other subcultures. Even core ideals are in a state of change, but the autonomy of the subculture remains intact with members securely grounded in a rich cultural environment. Acculturation occurs within each group through cultural exchanges on the street, in the media and through public cultural venues such as community art. Affiliations are not binding and individuals can have multiple subcultural affiliations (for instance: senior citizen artist cowboy or ethnic minority feminist geek) and move between subcultures according to their personal interests. America’s cultural pluralism does not subscribe to the isolationist misgivings of ethnocentricity as a rule. Although there are neofascist subcultures within the strata of multicultural society, the developing arrangement of subcultures and interaction between cultural groups undermines the directives of right wing advocates. America may indeed emerge from the culture wars as the model for a new world order.
The new cultural paradigm will reconfigure the oppositions of the culture war debate, and the decentralization of art culture will eventually bring the era of Modernism to a close. The radical contributions of relational and socially engaged aesthetics are transitional phases of late Modernism, as was post-modernism, necessary to resolve the erroneous suppositions of Kant’s transcendental idealism as set forth by Clive Bell, Clement Greenberg and others. Neither post-modernism nor relational aesthetics represent a substantial shift in the direction of art. The final phase of Modernism has yet to be realized.
Mainstream art no longer influences the array of subcultures in any significant way. What is needed is a new set of principles for structuring art into society not based on commercialization of culture or the top down orientation of the established hierarchy of art culture. The new ideology should foster the role of art as an integrating force that mediates the many layers of cultural groupings comprising the new pluralism. Just as propositional inversion was working in the undercurrents of Modernism and emerged at the end of post-Kantian aesthetics as the underlying strategy of post-modernism, the aesthetically determined egalitarian approach to community art has been at work throughout the Modern era and will only emerge as its own direction after the self-serving assumptions of the established hierarchy and the commodity orientation of art are realized as products of an outdated ideology.
