sakes of entertainment, instruction, provocation, and commerce circulate
continuously and widely through print mass media, radio, television, and the
movies. The experience of images, music, and text in the mass media is an
inescapable fact of life for most of today’s world. Even if one were not to own
a television or radio and to avoid popular magazines, it would be difficult to
avoid either billboards or recorded popular music in one’s environment,
unless one systematically cultivated rural reclusion. Artists of all kinds have
responded to this mass circulation of images, music, and text, both working
themselves within these media as scriptwriters, directors, musicians, graphic
ad designers, set dressers, and so on, and by incorporating into independent
work images, music, and text that are in general circulation. In the visual
arts, the early 1960s pop works of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, among
others, were the most prominent and successful responses to popular cul-
ture. It is often both frustrating and deeply interesting to think about these
works. What are we to make of Warhol’sBrillo Boxesor images of Marilyn, or
of Lichtenstein’s giant blowups of comic book images? Are they objects
meant for visual pleasure? Are they fun, or witty, or cerebral and meant to
provoke thought, or intended as social critique and commentary, or blatantly
commercial themselves? Quite probably they are all of these things, just as
movies and television shows can also try all at once to be commercially
successful, witty, moving, reflective, and fun, and can sometimes succeed.
Just what can be done in new media that use new technologies–both of mass
art and of the production of“singular objects”–remains to be worked out as
these media are explored. For example, what are the artistic possibilities of
the electronic sampling and recutting of lines or motifs from rock music, as
in rap and hip-hop?^85 Ted Cohen has usefully described a number of import-
ant dissimilarities between movies and television. Movies are watched in
different locations at different times, typically by an audience that is larger
than a few intimates but smaller than the crowd at a high school basketball
game. Television programs are watched by millions of people
(^85) Richard Shusterman defends the artistic interest of this work in“The Fine Art of Rap,”in
R. Shusterman,Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1992), pp. 201–35 and again in“Art in Action, Art Infraction: Goodman, Rap, Pragmatism
(New Reality Mix),”in R. Shusterman,Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical
Life(London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 131–53. This is interesting work, though to my ear he
both overrates the formal achievements in these media and suggests that rap is both more
serious and less centrally commercial than perhaps even its practitioners suppose.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 281