2 - Avant-Garde and Kitsch: Modern Art and Money on Screen, 1963–1964

Summary

Abstract

Two late Hollywood comedies – The Wheeler Dealers (MGM, 1963) and What a Way to Go! (Twentieth Century Fox, 1964) – thematize contemporary art, ridiculing its pretensions and travestying its cast of characters, while highlighting its market value. Released into a milieu in which much that set the stage for coming ruptures in American society occurred – civil rights actions, the escalation of war, and assassination – all mediated by the increasingly assertive medium of television, these films are symptoms of Hollywood's decline and reflections of the growth of the art market and a variety of new avant-gardes – from Pop Art to underground film.

Keywords: Art Market; Hollywood; comedy; Niki de Saint Phalle; Jean Tinguely

Much that set the stage for huge ruptures in the fabric of American society by the late 1960s happened in 1963: the March on Washington; sit-ins; the Birmingham campaign and other civil rights actions; the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam; the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique; and the assassination of President Kennedy, all experienced with televisual immediacy. But, according to Andy Warhol, “everything went young in 1964.” That next year, as President Johnson launched his war on poverty, Americans were distracted by the British Invasion and the opening of the New York World's Fair. Mass culture was on the minds of public intellectuals Marshall McLuhan and Susan Sontag, who introduced cool media and camp to mainstream audiences.

Amidst the endings and beginnings of these years, which seem like the last before American society and culture became hopelessly fractured, Hollywood cinema – the institution that, as perpetuated by the studio system, had held American audiences spellbound for half a century – was in a kind of death throes, as James Morrison put it, “a still-powerful institution, so recently new but quite suddenly old, trying to confront unprecedented social and cultural pressures while struggling perversely to maintain an equilibrium that was clearly already gone.” Meanwhile, television, McLuhan's “cool” medium, was hot – it had reached over 50 million US households – as was the art market. Prices for contemporary works had been climbing to unprecedented levels since the mid 1950s. Pop Art, Underground cinema, and other conspicuously new avant-gardes – no doubt made conspicuous by television – were causing bemusement and outrage in full view of larger audiences than the avant-garde had previously imagined possible.