"Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture."
Vivienne Westwood
Green Gartside, Smash Hits, June 1982.
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Sterling Morrison, quoted in Rob Sheffield's Beatles book I'm guessing the VU hated the Mothers ever since that period when the latt... -
"When I first saw Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' , I turned to my wife during the screening & said, “Everything I have d...
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The pinnacle of that view of freedom, of course, is avant-garde jazz, which I find by and large a dead loss. It operates on the assumption...
You have to love VW, and that's a nice aphorism.
ReplyDeleteBut surely the exact opposite is true. In reality, if it's not popular, it's not culture. It's taste, or something. But not culture.
I don't know if you do have to love VW - many, perhaps most, of her pronouncements, on things are bunk. And she's the co-authoress of the Cambridge Rapist T-shirt and "She's Dead, I'm Alive, I'm Yours" post-Spungen Viciuos T-shirt.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of those quotes where the caveat in the header applies - "don't necessarily agree with this". So yeah I agree with you, or at least lean that way: if it's not popular, it fails to become culture in the fullest sense, it's a niche taste, a minority interest. Culture in the small 'c' sense is demotic and thus more vital / vibrant.
But it's interesting that she would go that way, the path of unabashed snobbery. It also creates an inbuilt self-defeating syndrome, because if (as with the Sex pistols) the stuff is commercially successfully, makes the top ten, then (by your own lights) the project has failed.
I dunno - Westwood was never really a populist nor was intellectual coherence her strength.
ReplyDeleteThere is a weird resentment in the fashion world. On the one hand, it seems built on a disdain for the plebs. On the other, the path to obscene riches is via masstige megabrands, not tiny, exclusive shows.
I've been reading some Matthew Arnold recently - who seems relevant to this with his obsessions with culture and class.
Perhaps someone should write "Couture and Anarchy".
Yes, I think I would say you have to love Westwood for her contribution to the cultural vitality of the nation, not because she is a reliable authority on the social and political issues of the day.
ReplyDeleteAs you say, the tension between elite status and the mass market is inherent to the fashion industry, and brands put a huge amount of effort into managing it effectively. It's the central theme of the movie House of Gucci, which a lot of people hated but I really enjoyed.
I like Simon's suggestion that - at least from Westwood's perspective - what happened with Punk was that that tension was mishandled. It was a style and culture that was always intended for the in-crowd only, but got away from them and became a movement. Westwood was like Frankenstein, watching as her (shared) creation escaped from her workshop and took on a life of its own.
Although I am sure McLaren just wanted to shift as much music and merch as possible.
Tom Wolfe once remarked that Dickens and Dostoyevsky would be shocked by any sense of division between the serious novel and the popular novel. But I guess there is a common dread that popular culture can become a monoculture, smothering any and all examples of nonconformity (e.g., Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola grumbling about the commercial oppressiveness of Marvel movies).
ReplyDeleteAlthough there's an odd paradox with that example, in that Marvel movies are designed to appeal across multiple cultures, due to the burgeoning commercial import of foreign markets.