Neo-Pop

Neo-Pop: Venice Boardwalk Cultural Experience

The sacred narratives of Western cultural mythology have been carried down from generation to generation for over two thousand years. In the past few decades, however, America has endured a despiritualization of its cultural traditions from influences as wide ranging as the rise of multiculturalism, the impacts of the television mystique and consumerism and the disenfranchisement of occidental philosophies and monolithic Western history. With the decline in the intensity of the cultural experience, traditional cultural disciplines for acquiring ethical and aesthetic values have lost their influence on society. Today we stand at the end of an epoch. The fragmented masks of Western culture no longer reflect the postmodern persona. Western cultural traditions have become anachronisms.

Culture, not commerce, is the common ground of civilization. It is the subjective alliance that binds and unifies society. Culture is not academic or material or tangible. It is not image or information or technology. The content of culture transfers poorly into mass-reproduced prints and compact disks. The experience of the original is left out of the reproduction; the transcription is never complete. Culture requires active involvement; the individual has to seek (or at least be open to) the cultural experience.

Where do people go to find relevant cultural experiences for integration into postmodern society? One place the public can go is Venice California, where the summertime boardwalk experience provides the basis for a grassroots reclamation of culture that has been going for decades. Culture is generated by the hundreds of thousands of people united by their participation in the boardwalk parade and by a common belief in the virtues of summertime at the beach. In Venice, it is the four S’s: sun, sand, surf and sunglasses. Sunglasses, the hippest, coolest ones you can find, are the price of admission. They are a ritual mask, chosen to project an image as participants stroll the busy boardwalk donned in favorite apparel. From behind the shades, personal spaces are secure. The participant becomes both spectator and part of the spectacle. Although the spectator is on display, sunglasses provide aesthetic distance (autonomy) as he checks out alternative lifestyles passing in the crowd. The boardwalk is at the apex of a desublimation process that derives culture from the mix of social alternatives. From across the country and around the world people crowd together on the boardwalk to be part of what is happening.

People come to Venice to be part of the summertime spectacle -- they come to see and be seen. They see how their choices and personal values compare to others on the boardwalk. They shake their heads in collective disapproval at passing indigents and panhandlers -- and laugh among themselves in nervous reassurance at what they do not understand. Nowhere else does the mix of influences that makes up contemporary America exist more openly than in the three-ring circus atmosphere of the Ocean Front Walk. Nothing is left in the closet. In Venice, truth and meaning and cultural values work themselves out on the street. Amid the extremes of Ocean Front Walk, culture develops directly from the interface of juxtaposed styles and personalities. Standing in the crowd the individual feels the raw edge of the socialization process. He looks to find himself amid the barrage of leading edge alternatives. What he finds is his place in postmodern society.

In the twenty-first century, what society requires of culture is not progress or tradition but symbols for integration into the changing world. The boardwalk parade is progenitor for a new cultural discipline developing in response to society’s need for the orienting experiences of culture. The boardwalk experience is not new. But as the emotive content of Western culture is lost to commercialism and reductionism, the experience of the summer time crowd on the Ocean Front Walk stands out for its vitality. As cultural traditions falter, society takes to the streets in search of cultural values. The boardwalk experience has become the prototype of Neo-Pop, a new art form in the making.

Capitalism co-opts any art form reducible to commodity. Neo-pop produces no commodities. It incorporates the subjective mechanisms of culture in a manner preempting direct corruption by capital interests. The boardwalk experience is essentially self-contained among the participants. It is augmented, but not corrupted, by street performers, fortune tellers, art galleries, mural art, local history and architecture and by the fashions of the shops and sidewalk vendors. On the boardwalk, culture is born of a process of cultural mediation free of capital subversion. Profiteers hover near the action waiting to cash in at every opportunity. But capital interests are largely unable to invade the cultural process unfolding on the boardwalk. Commercialism is unable to contaminate or co-opt the aesthetic perceptions taking place in the crowd.

Life on Ocean Front Walk is a microcosm of life in America in the twenty-first century. The shift in personal values evoked by the boardwalk experience precedes similar realignments being made across America. Culture is regenerative, a point missed by the pessimism of the late twentieth century. The grassroots regeneration of values through invented rituals in popular culture fills the void left by the commercialization of culture. Neo-Pop signals a new direction and a new attitude in art culture. Through the masked rituals of Neo-Pop, cultural values are generated to assimilate new cultural pluralism in America.