Cold War Confrontations: US Exhibitions and Their Role in the Cultural Cold War.


By Jack Masey and Conway Lloyd Morgan.

New York and London: Lars Müller Publishers, November 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-3037781234, $49.95. 423 pages.

Review by Antonio Thompson, Austin Peay State University

Cold War Confrontations: US Exhibitions and Their Role in the Cultural Cold War, by Jack Masey and Conway Lloyd Morgan, examines the conflicts and events of the unfolding Cold War through a unique lens, that of American exhibitions. In ten chapters and 423 pages the authors examine U.S. displays from 1948 with the Marshall Plan Traveling Caravans, through the present, concluding with the abolishment of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1999 and Congressional talks proposing recreating it in 2007.

The author’s aim is to demonstrate that “the World’s Fairs . . . provided key opportunities for confrontation between the Free West and the Communist East, each trying to upstage the other” (6). This is not their only goal, however; the authors are equally interested in the changes in design and technology over the nearly fifty years of the Cold War as emphasized at these fairs. Masey was a former member of the USIA (1951 to 1979), part of this time as Director of Design. After leaving he formed his own company that helped design the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Museums. Morgan is a Senior Lecturer at the Newport School of Art, Media, and Design, at the University of Wales, Newport.

The book is a mixture of architecture, technology, history, and memoir. The authors place each of the World’s Fairs within the greater context of the Cold War. Each chapter has a brief introduction describing the status of the Cold War, while subheadings describe relevant changes in technology, medicine, and architecture. Each chapter is set up with numerous photographs and copies of documents relevant to the exhibition. Text and quotes of varying size are interwoven throughout the work and in between the pictures and documents. Although the book could easily fit on a book shelf, the heavy stock paper, weight of the book, and layout loan itself to be used as a coffee table book.

One of the strengths of this work is also its weakness: the book is heavily illustrated. Although each picture has captions, the sheer number of photographs virtually allows the story to be told through the images. The varying text sizes and placement of text, while informative, can also be distracting. One must remember that the authors are not professional historians, but are telling history through the lens of the World’s Fair exhibits. Those interested in the World’s Fairs or the cultural and architectural side of the Cold War would enjoy this work.

The Medieval Cook.

By Bridget Ann Henisch.

Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, February 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-1843834380, $47.95. 200 pages.

Review by Stephanie Plummer, Bowling Green State University

Medieval foodways, as shown in popular film or understood in the popular imagination, rely on motifs of abundance and lack. Regardless of the historical accuracy in film, or its scarcity, what is frequently missing in these images is an interpretive framework for understanding what it meant to eat in the medieval period. Foodways scholars, anthropologists, and cultural analysts have worked to build such a framework, providing useful ways to approach what might otherwise be a forgotten force in the progression of history. In particular, the anthropologist Sidney Mintz and American Studies professor Warren Belasco, among others, have worked to outline the power, hierarchy, and cultural markers present in our understanding of taste and even our daily meals.

Although food studies has made great strides toward creating unified theories about food, this scholarship has tended toward an analysis of a particular contemporary culture, as part of far-thrown anthropological fieldwork or consumerist critique. Bridget Ann Henisch, in her fourth book, The Medieval Cook, departs from the tendency toward exoticizing food or focusing on a single food item while reinforcing the previous work of foodways scholars to link social and economic class with food consumption. As Henisch states in her preface, the goal of The Medieval Cook is to illuminate the context of medieval kitchens and dining rooms, and the individuals who participated in those activities. The Medieval Cook examines much of Western Europe beginning roughly with the Norman Conquest and extending into the early 1500s. Thus, The Medieval Cook pieces together the literature, art, and visual culture of the medieval period to construct an image of chefs and cooks, abundance and lack, banquet halls and cottage hearths.

In this way, Henisch eschews heavy-handed analysis while clearly outlining in six chapters the borders that marked the medieval “haves” from the “have-nots.” Chapters such as “Fast Food and Fine Catering” discuss those areas of medieval life, the market stalls, taverns, guest houses, bakeries and butcher shops, which betrayed one’s class, position, and to some medieval Europeans, one’s questionable moral character. The final chapter, “On the Edge: the Cook in Art,” deviates from the general purpose of the other chapters by discussing works of art that feature medieval kitchen workers or specific medieval foods, such as pancakes. This chapter is less about the general mood and activities of people in the middle ages and more about the visual culture which remains from that time. Nonetheless, this chapter describes the visual, medieval context of the culinary arts; thus, it fits well into the overall goal of The Medieval Cook. In this chapter Henisch also outlines The Medieval Cook’s conclusions, that medieval cookery was not entirely appreciated as an art, that food’s central position in daily life meant it could not be excluded from art and literature and that medieval cooks knew the difficult work of improvisation. That this chapter includes the author’s end remarks is not entirely clear until the last few pages of the chapter. As a result, Henisch’s condensed conclusions leave the reader wanting more guidance about the book’s overall meaning.

Henisch has charged herself with no small task considering the challenges inherent in gathering information recorded over the six centuries discussed in The Medieval Cook. Illiteracy, most common among the lowest economic strata and those also most likely to be household workers in the medieval period, means that a picture of medieval cookery could only ever be partial. Furthermore, dealing with delicate and potentially deteriorating documents certainly must have been a challenge in achieving a complete image of medieval foodways. Even determining the medieval period’s beginning and end dates could be difficult given the contentiousness which surrounds academic definitions of exactly when and where medieval society was situated.

Although The Medieval Cook might have benefited from addressing issues such as time frame or regional difference more closely, Henisch provides readers with a vivid description of food and preparation methods, subjects which can be especially difficult to transmit to readers. Furthermore, it is clear from the vivid language in The Medieval Cook that Henisch enjoys writing about food. This may be the reason that several recipes for medieval fare appear in The Medieval Cook for the adventurous food lover to try out. Additionally, the descriptiveness and excitement in her writing transforms what could potentially be a dry subject into a lush treat for readers. Despite The Medieval Cook’s accessibility, some excerpts taken from medieval literature could prove a stumbling block for readers unfamiliar with Middle English. Henisch combats this in some areas by providing a direct, modern translation, while keeping these excerpts to a minimum and often using their presence to enhance the drama and tension which surrounded medieval household management.

What is given to the reader, then, is a fair opportunity to scrutinize for him or herself the management of medieval kitchens and foodways or at the very least, the way these things were represented by medieval artisans and writers. As a result, The Medieval Cook may be of interest to chefs, home cooks, and those interested in history or the culinary arts. However, the conclusions and research in The Medieval Cook would also be helpful to art historians, literary scholars, medievalists, cultural anthropologists, and popular culture scholars. In particular, Henisch’s research adds to a large body of work on the interaction between foodways and social and economic class, while giving readers a rather comprehensive description of the jobs, dishes, ingredients, and utensils present in medieval kitchens

Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film.

By Christine Sprengler.

New York: Berghahn Books, January 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-1845455590, $60. 208 pages.

Review by Greta Methot, Rhode Island School of Design

In this ambitious first book, author Christine Sprengler takes as her focus a specific form of nostalgia: the cinematic “visual pastness” made up of props, costuming, and other material cues and signifiers employed to evoke past eras. This nostalgic mode is often criticized for seemingly replacing history with an inferior aesthetic stand-in, in other words, for “turning the 1950s into Fiftiesness” (2). Screening Nostalgia asks, does this most derided expression of nostalgia sever our connection to history as some scholars charge, or, does it offer critical potential? Sprengler wants to rescue this form by delving into the aesthetic materials of nostalgia to reveal their semiotic potential. Even when not intended to critical ends, the author maintains that the visual apparatus of nostalgia film can, “reveal something about our own historical consciousness and what we expect history to do for us” (90).

Sprengler’s detailed and absorbing history of nostalgia informs us that the term originated as a medical diagnosis applied to the physical manifestations of homesickness suffered by Swiss soldiers serving abroad during the seventeenth century. Over time, this geographic conception of nostalgia morphed into a kind of nationalism; to be nostalgic for one’s homeland equated to patriotism. Such an ideological shift meant nostalgia could be harnessed for political purposes. While a medical definition of nostalgia persisted into the twentieth century, the upheavals of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism saw nostalgia increasingly characterized as a temporal longing—a pining for simpler days, for an idyllic past—what Sprengler calls a “necessary coping mechanism with the capacity to make modernity inhabitable” (15).

By 1970, nostalgia had become an industry. Material goods, television, radio, and film all catered to a consumer base craving a taste of halcyon days bygone. At the same time, the politicization of nostalgia crested as the battle continued to rage between conservatives advocating for a return to “traditional values,” and social liberals seeking reform. This resulted in a stigma for nostalgia in that it came to be associated with a kind of propagandizing conservative agenda, particularly in the employ of Ronald Reagan’s political juggernaut. Chief among the disparagements leveled at nostalgia by academics and cultural critics was the concern that it commodified, falsified, or fetishized the past. Not until quite recently have scholars begun to argue, as Sprengler does, for the critical potential of nostalgia.

In chapter two, Sprengler investigates how the Fifties came to be the privileged object of American nostalgia for later eras. The proliferation of visual mass media during this period, particularly advertising and domestic television sitcoms, produced a canon of objects to signify the lauded values of the American Dream. Populuxe items such as the exaggerated styling of cars, fashions, and household appliances created a visual language evoking the economic values of the postwar years. As nostalgia for the Fifties gained ground in the 1970s, especially in films and television, these material objects were employed as visual shorthand for Fifties ideology. In what is an otherwise thorough and fascinating discussion, Sprengler neglects examination of the 1960s—a period when the defenders of the “traditional” values of the postwar years came into conflict with the social renegades of the various arms of the counterculture. Though the impact of this period has been considered thoughtfully elsewhere (see Daniel Marcus’ Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics, for example), some brief attention here would have been helpful to bridge the 50s-70s gap.

After defining the parameters of the nostalgia film genre and engaging briefly with its chief critics in chapter three, the remaining chapters examine specific aesthetic devices employed in several recent Hollywood films. First, Sprengler investigates 1950s automobile tail fins as a metonym for post-war consumerism in Frank Miller’s Sin City. The ostentatious, rocket-like design of the tail fin operates as an emblem of postwar technology, futurity, and prosperity. Sin City’s highly stylized, comic book-inspired vision of 50s noir and the corruption and crime evoked by that realm contrasts with the film’s fetishizing of the tail-finned car. Thus, Sprengler concludes, the film manages to offer oppositional views of the Fifties and provides a glimpse of the competing mythologies of that era.

The most engaging of Screening Nostalgia’s close readings provides compelling analysis of the use of costuming and color to suggest characters’ unexpressed desires and allegiances in Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven. Rather than reference the historical period overtly, Haynes’s film relies on sets, props, colors, and costumes to manifest the atmosphere established in the 1950s melodramas of filmmaker Douglas Sirk. Sprengler examines how the film strategically employs costume color and 50s fashion styles to convey the values of the era while simultaneously revealing the repressiveness and hypocrisy of those values.

Next, Sprengler takes on The Aviator’s use of what she terms a “technicolor aesthetic,” referring to that film’s digital recreation of mid-century film processes and palettes. Acknowledging that such films are frequently criticized for being overly indulgent in surface at the expense of substance, Sprengler attempts to recoup the historical value of Martin Scorsese’s film. While The Aviator may not faithfully reproduce Howard Hughes’s story, Sprengler finds that Scorsese’s painstaking replication of the look of two and three strip color film processing, “does important historical work” by informing audiences of the color film technologies of the 20s and 30s (149).

Finally, all the tools of visual pastness—props, costuming, black and white film— are put to work in The Good German in order to recreate the look and feel of a 1940s film. “Style is its alibi,” Sprengler asserts, and such a strategy allows director Steven Soderbergh to indirectly indict America for current geopolitical offenses while safely cloaked in the visual pastness of a nostalgia film (172).

Screening Nostalgia provides a cogent summary of the history of America’s love affair with nostalgia as well as offering useful examples of how to mobilize nostalgia in critically sophisticated ways. The text is engaging and accessible and should have wide appeal, particularly among scholars and students of film and American cultural history.

A History of the Future.


By Donna Goodman.

New York: The Monacelli Press, November 2008. Cloth: ISBN-13: 978-1580932073, $45. 280 pages.

Review by Yves Laberge, Laval University, Quebec

How did artists, writers, filmmakers and architects from previous centuries imagine and represent their idea of times to come? Now that we more or less live in what could be called their future, can we verify how precise and accurate were their visions and predictions? Did things actually evolve as planned by visionaries from the past? Were architects and artists imagining the past right in their intuitions? In other words, did we follow their plans as we built “the future”? In order to explore these questions, this richly illustrated book explains the many facets of futuristic aesthetics through the past centuries.

Scholars and students in American Studies will find here an exhaustive investigation that also works of the imagination but also real projects that were achieved in real life: for example, Harvey Wiley Corbett's vision of New York in the future, with many skyscrapers and multilevel highways, as illustrated here with early-twentieth-century color postcards and excerpts from Scientific American (38). We find as well countless representations of modernity and visions of utopian future in various feature films, from Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis (1927) to Busby Berkeley's beautifully designed musicals, and William Cameron Menzies's Things To Come (1936), adapted from H.G. Wells's novel.

The first section is dedicated to Europe, with many accurate references to Renaissance thought, philosopher Thomas More (who wrote the first "classic" book about utopia), but also Le Corbusier in France, Futurism in Italy, Expressionism and the Bauhaus movements in Germany. But most of the seven chapters focus on the USA during the twentieth century, especially in chapters 2-5, the "Machine Age," the "Automobile Age," and the "Space Age.” In a way, one could argue that the future has always been a part of our lives. For example, public events like World Fairs were immensely popular and depicted many forecasts of the future, as demonstrated here with the New York City case and the famous 1967 Montréal Man and His World Fair, which is commented upon and is shown on the book's cover.

Chapter 6 centred on the media age also mixes various elements and mottos which characterized the post-World War II era, from Marshall McLuhan's famous predictions about the role of television in our daily lives, to the utopian visions of the Disneyland park (that incidentally included a street named "Tomorrowland"), which was then nicknamed "the happiest place on Earth" (203).

The book's final chapter focuses on "The Environmental Age," which began with Rachel Carson's famous book Silent Spring in 1962. In this case, explaining how environmental thought evolved during the recent decades is done through numerous examples taken from architectural projects featuring nature-friendly aspects. The explanation takes into account the role of ideologies, often pessimistic, about the new challenges (and the appropriate solutions, like eco-tourism) for the near future, from overpopulation to global warming. In that sense, the author succeeds in bringing many accurate examples and a strong theoretical framework, which comprises recent trends like deconstruction and postmodernism (212). In other words, this thought-provoking book is not just a collection of fascinating images, but rather an invitation to reading and exploring other salient works. However, the conclusion remains open, as there is no final chapter or recapitulation about what we could tentatively name "the evolution of the idea of the future.”

Many interesting ideas emerge from all these chapters. First, the idea of the future has been present in many cultures and countries, in all facets of arts and culture, from novels to movies, from architecture to fine arts, and in urban planning as well. Second, we realize that the idea of the future and the projects that can illustrate the years to come do not often become a tangible reality; furthermore, these "old images of the future" tend to become obsolete and sometimes look naïve afterwards — but not at the moment when they are being made or released. This phenomenon can demonstrate the fundamental distinction between something new (that is never been seen) and something futuristic ("that announces what is likely to happen sooner or later"). Nonetheless, some examples remind us of the important links between fiction and reality: for example, the U.S. military "Star Wars" defense system, named after a popular movie series (192). From what I learned here, I concluded that studying the many representations of the future can serve as an examination of the contemporary ideas and mentalities of a given moment, and therefore, inform us indirectly about the beliefs, values, fears, and hopes of the past.

In sum, because this excellent book tells us more about the past than the future, A History of the Future is already an essential book for historians in many fields (culture, ideas, literature, science, and technology), as well as a very stimulating study of modernity itself. I would define that concept of modernity as the capacity to show how things are changing at a particular moment, focusing precisely on the change in itself. In this case, modernity should not be confused with modernism, another twentieth-century concept that is presented here, as is the reaction against it that occurred during the 1960s (196). Perhaps the only major artist missing in this book is French filmmaker Marcel L'Herbier (1888-1979), who directed a modern masterpiece, L'Inhumaine, in 1924, which remains difficult to find nowadays.

For students in architecture, design, and Cultural Studies, this comprehensive History of the Future will be a delight. The author's style is jargon-free, with short paragraphs that are always easy to follow; her lavish book should be ranked in the category "history of ideas.” It could be appreciated by undergraduates and non-scholars as well; in my eyes, this History of the Future seems to be essential for public libraries and universities as well. Once again, this gorgeous publication reconfirms the reputation of Monacelli Press as a high-class publisher of art books.

Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture.

By Jaap Kooijman.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, December 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-90-5356-492-9, $45. 224 pages.

Review by Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Ankara

Fabricating the Absolute Fake offers an incisive look at how American culture – as represented by Hollywood cinema, television and popular music – has penetrated the world. Kooijman argues that “Americanization” has less to do with politics and more with “an imagined America, an imagined community that goes far beyond the boundaries of the nation-state USA” (143). Drawing on Umberto Eco’s concept of the absolute fake, Kooijman shows how American pop culture consists of fakes that succeed as “the real thing”—in other words, improved copies of the “real” originals. This is particularly evident, for instance, in the way Dutch popular culture appropriates artefacts based on an original, and presents them as their own version of “America.” Kooijman avoids making any value-judgments on such appropriations, but rather invokes Thomas Elsaesser’s concept of “Karaoke Americanism” to show how “America” can be represented in different ways in culture-specific contexts, ranging from “explicit hyper-Americanness to implicit mimicking of an American original in which the association with ‘America’ is almost lost” (144).

The book is divided into two sections. The first, comprised of three chapters, uses specific case-studies to show how “America” and Americanism now dominates the world. Such terms are often synonymous with universalism; this is evident, for example, in USA for Africa’s single “We are the World” (1985) whose ostensible purpose was to broaden awareness of the Ethiopian famine, but nonetheless “invest[ed] its ideal of global human universalism with the star myth and the American Dream, both based on a belief in meritocracy which promotes individual agency and self-reliance.” The video bears strong visual resemblances to the famous “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” commercial, produced by Coca-Cola in 1971; this turns “an act of benevolence into an act of consumption” (140). Koijman subsequently analyzes how American television disseminates a view of the world based on individual and personal choice (through shows like Oprah). The third chapter treads a familiar path by showing how the American media constructs a hyperreal world, in which the first Gulf War of 1991 becomes a major television event, and where occasions such as the Super Bowl are transformed into patriotic celebrations of the American war effort in Iraq: “the intertwining of sports, the military, patriotism and popular entertainment presents a combination that is difficult to resist” (83). Hollywood cinema assumes such a dominant position in popular culture that it now influences the media’s presentation of current affairs: the 9/11 catastrophe played out on television like a disaster movie. Koijman quotes Jean Baudrillard, who argues that “the American experience as fiction . . . shapes . . . imagination into the form of reality” (90).

The second part of Fabricating the Absolute Fake looks at how Dutch popular culture has appropriated American images. He cites the example of Lee Towers (né Leen Huyzer), a popular crooner described as a cross between Sinatra, Presley and Tony Bennett. While performing standards such as “You’ll Never Walk Alone” or “I Can See Clearly Now,” he has translated his hyper-Americanness into a local and national idiom: “[Towers’] star image is rooted in Rotterdam working-class culture, exemplified by his identification with the Rotterdam harbor and the local soccer club Feyenoord” (102). Towers’s example parallels that of the 1950s British rock ‘n roll singer Tommy Steele (né Thomas Hicks) who established his own version of the genre rooted in Cockney culture. Kooijman also focuses on the Moroccan-Dutch hip-hop artist Ali B (“the American rapper that never was”) who uses the imagery of African-American gangsta rap to assume the persona of a streetwise rapper (113). The author believes that such performers have indulged in Karaoke Americanism, “an active performance of mimicking and mockery, based on the clichéd conventions of pop culture, yet also paying tribute to the [American] original in a specific local or national manner” (117).

Despite Richard Dyer’s claims in the publicity blurb that Fabricating the Absolute Fake is a “daring and persuasive” piece of critical analysis, the book actually covers familiar ground by showing how non-American artistes have adapted American cultural icons for their own purposes. Ali B’s example resembles that of Sacha Baron Cohen, who began his career by assuming the comic persona of Ali G, the streetwise rapper from the quiet London suburb of Staines. Kooijman’s argument depends on familiar binary oppositions (global/local, American/non-American), which tend to minimize the capacity of individual artistes to respond to American popular culture in different ways. Kooijman is well aware of this, as he points out that “Not all American viewers will be hailed successfully into the position of ‘docile patriot,’ or ‘infantile citizen,’ and not all non-American viewers will be seduced by the uncritical portrayal of America as the Beacon of Freedom and Democracy” (66). Nonetheless some evidence of how viewers react to shows like Oprah—in the form of surveys, ethnographic studies or blogs—might have given a sense of how (or even whether) dominant images of American culture as disseminated through the media affect individual consumers.

The book contains distracting proofreading errors that could easily have been avoided: Capital instead of Capitol Building (44), NYDP instead of NYPD Blue (53), Bagdad for Baghdad (81), and Top of the Pop rather than Top of the Pops (104). Nonetheless, Fabricating the Absolute Fake is an entertaining read, lucidly argued with a wealth of examples from both Dutch and American popular cultures. What we understand from the book is how “pop culture can be both manipulative and empowering,” allowing for the creation of an imagined America that opens up new spaces for “a shared sense of belonging across different cultural and ethnic identities” (124).

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective.

By Marguerite H. Rippy.

Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, April 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-0-8093-2912-0, $35. 248 pages.

Review by Chris Pallant, Bangor University, United Kingdom


Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective proves a useful addition to film scholarship, particularly in its dissection of the Wellesian star persona. Divided into four chapters, Rippy’s study details the unfinished Life of Christ, Heart of Darkness, and It’s All True RKO projects, while also spending time discussing Welles’s early radio work, his First Person Singular performances, and the completed Citizen Kane (1941).

Welles’s name commonly features in debates concerning the film auteur, yet Rippy argues that the maverick figure be reconceived as a “star director,” in order “to emphasise the director’s commercial connection to a work while avoiding the tendency to assign the director sole artistic authority” (3). Early in the study, Rippy illustrates how, in addition to being one of the first star directors, Welles, by revealing specific artistic constants, which RKO then publicized, anticipates many of the strategies of contemporary branding. The postmodern nature of the Welles brand is most visible in its malleability. Rippy writes: “The essence of the Welles creation tale is that he is a cosmopolitan genius. The specifics of the tale vary according to the audience (or potential consumer)” (23-24). Ultimately, the decentered nature of the Welles brand, which included a proclivity towards both commercial and commercially unpalatable ventures, led not only to the abandonment of projects such as Life of Christ, but also his break with RKO.

Later in the study, Rippy discusses the unfinished It’s All True, arguing that, because of its well documented incompletion, the project provides a rare insight into the politics of national identity and Hollywood commerce in the mid 1900s. Welles was, albeit unintentionally, central in orchestrating one of the most damaging exploitations of South America during this period. In a typically uncompromising attempt to fuse truth and fiction during the production of It’s All True, Welles sought to recreate a famous civil rights event, where four jangadeiros (impoverished Brazilian sea fishermen) sailed to Rio de Janeiro to meet President Vargas. As Rippy observes, while Welles’s decision to hire the four original jangadeiros would have undoubtedly have been part of a scheme to romanticize their plight, it “still held the potential to let poverty speak for itself, a revolutionary concept for mainstream Hollywood” (119). However, during an ocean shoot, the boat carrying the four capsized, resulting in the death of Manoel Olimpio Meira—known as Jacaré to the jangadeiros.

Welles has been the subject of much scholarly interest. The Films of Orson Welles, (Robert Garis, 2004), Despite the System: Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Studios (Clinton Heylin, 2005), and Discovering Orson Welles (Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2007), have recently added to earlier editions such as Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (Simon Callow, 1996) and This is Orson Welles (Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum, 1998). The Medium and the Magician: Orson Welles, the Radio Years, 1934-1952 (Paul Heyer, 2005) and and It's all True: Orson Welles's Pan-American Odyssey (Catherine L. Benamou, 2007), partially anticipate Rippy’s study, yet neither offers such a consistently postmodern revision of the star director. In addition to demonstrating an awareness of current research, Rippy also makes good use of archival material. Ultimately, despite Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects suffering from some minor editorial lapses (resulting in occasional repetition), Rippy’s text provides a good starting point for those wishing to learn more about Welles’s unconventional early career.

Interestingly, Rippy discusses how recent projects, such as The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004), War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, 2005), and The Daily Show (Comedy Central, 1996-present), reveal artistic and ideological debts to Welles’s work. There is room, perhaps, to extend this debate to include figures such as Sacha Baron Cohen, who, at times, also exhibits a strong inclination towards Wellesian “truthiness”—the negotiation of the line between news and entertainment. Rippy closes by identifying how contemporary media have provided viewers with the means to return to Welles’s unfinished texts, and, rather than seek ways to “complete” them, enjoy their hermeneutic freedom. Welles’s unfinished projects are, as Rippy concludes, ideally suited for “interactive presentation as a series of fragmentary texts, audio files, correspondence, photographs, interviews, blogs, storyboards, and media ephemera” (169).

Popular Culture Values and the Arts: Essays on Elitism versus Democratization.


Edited by Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland, June 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-0-7864-3944-7, $39.95. 230 pages.
Review by Stephen Gennaro, York University, Toronto



In their current collection of essays, Popular Culture Values and the Arts: Essays on Elitism versus Democratization, editors Ray Browne and Lawrence Kreiser Jr. examine the question, is art democratic? More precisely, the collection seeks to explore if the interpretation of art is (or can be) a democratic process, or if “the full range and depth of the arts and aesthetics should be left with and controlled by the elite in power” (21). In order to do so, the editors provide the reader with a collection of thirteen essays , divided into five sections, which further illuminate the history of folk , high, and low (popular) culture and the role that technological and socio-cultural changes have played in the democratization of the arts; that is, the process by which art, as a communicator of ideas, values, ideologies, and expressions of the surroundings in which it is created, is made available to all—or restricted in access.

In examining the relationship between the high/low divide, Browne and Kreiser are participating in a larger discussion in academia that continues to assess (and re-assess) the value of this type of binary distinction in the study of popular culture. The popularity of the Birmingham School’s adaptation of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony over the last quarter century has created a widely recognized interpretation of the relationship between the individual and the culture industries, which accounts for the agency of the individual even in the midst of a mass consumer society. According to recent work in the field of Cultural Studies, the text is not a site of domination, nor is it a site for the reproduction of dominant ideologies. Rather, the text is viewed as a meeting place where meaning is negotiated (and re-negotiated) between the dominant ideologies of production and the active agents of consumption. This optimistic approach to the relationship between the individual and the culture industries provides the readers, viewers, and consumers the agency to resist, subvert, or accept the text’s explicit and implicit ideologies, and has replaced earlier discourses of the dangers of mass society, which were often entangled in larger and more problematic representations of power and privilege through its use of terms such as high (elite) and low (popular or folk) culture.

One of the interesting ways that Browne and Kreiser’s collection of essays attempts to deal with the high/low divide is to problematize the binary by suggesting that the categories for research and appreciation are actually three-fold; and that popular and folk culture, both categories often grouped into the meta-category of low culture, are each deserving of their own “space.” As such, the collection of essays attempts to provide spaces for discussing popular and folk culture as separate entities, and does so quite successfully in the first three sections of the book on “Folk Roots,” “Developing the Oversized Spirit,” and “Breaking the Cast” through an examination of both the current American society and its historical roots. The collection is less successful in providing a space for critiquing the high/low divide in the last two sections of the book, “Promoting the American (and World) Dream” and “Outsider Views of American Cultures,” which deal more specifically with the imperialistic elements of American popular culture and in many ways buy directly into the very elements of the high/low dichotomy that the collection seeks to problematize.

The discussions surrounding American popular culture found in the last two sections of the book are the low point of this collection and take away from the excellent insight to be gained in the scholarship of high, low, and folk, culture that the first ten essays offer the reader. For starters, the pieces chosen for the discussion of American popular culture do not appear to fit with the earlier themes of the collection. Whereas earlier pieces such as Urish’s “Cultural Aesthetics: Anthropology and the (In) Visible Values of “Art” or Crawford’s “Who Gets to Play? The Hegemony of Copyright and Trademark in Art and Popular Culture” are well-written, thoughtful pieces that not only survey the field of contemporary scholarship but then add to that with insightful case studies, essays such as Batchelor’s “Selling Culture to the People: Advertising, Marketing, and Public Relations in a Changing World” appear lacking in scholarship. The article is grounded in generalizations and assumptions and fails to connect with any existing work in the field. For example, within Batchelor’s discussion of advertising and marketing as education, he quote’s Irene Costera Meijer’s use of the term “positive realism” and then proceeds to uses it as an anchoring term for his own work. However, nowhere in either the text, or the notes to the essay is there any discussion of how Costera Meijer borrows this term from advertising historian and cultural critic Michael Schudson’s work on “capitalist realism.” Equally frustrating is how Batchelor grounds his discussion of the current social role of advertising on Christopher Lasch’s 1991 work The Culture of Narcissism, and Batchelor’s referring to Lasch as the “brilliant cultural historian” (177). Missing from Batchelor’s piece is any reference to the significant amount of work over the last eighteen years in this field by scholars such as Kellner, Giroux, or McChesney, just to name a few.

Despite these weaknesses late in the volume, this collection can and should be viewed as an excellent resource for scholars interested in folk art, visual arts, popular culture, the high/low divide, and democracy. The collection provides the reader with a current and thought-provoking discussion of the connection between art and democracy, grounded in an excellent history of the relationship between the two entities. Whether it is Browne and Kreiser’s excellent essay “Garden of the Folk Arts” or Neal’s extremely well-thought-out discussion of “Values, Popular Culture and Social Change,” the collection explores the subject of the democratization of arts from multiple disciplines and a variety of viewpoints and only really falls short of its mandate, to “outline some, though not all, [of the] battlefields between the cultures in control and those in rebellion, in art enjoyment” (31), in the last two sections where the essays appear more interested in re-affirming the high/low divide than in discussing the spaces for both enjoyment and resistance.