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America has incorporated a long history of people choosing to embrace alternative communal societies, from the initial vision of Pilgrims through later groups, including the Shakers, the Oneida communities, Mormons and socialists. This heritage was revitalized in the 1960s by youths using communal settings as support to escape commercialism and other American values. Some were religious, with a special fascination with Eastern religion. Others, both ephemeral and longer-enduring, were defined by lifestyles, new values of gender and sexuality, “nature” and simplicity or vague countercultural ideologies.
Industry:Culture
America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is known as an increasingly litigious society in which trials and verdicts are covered in news and gossip and via books by the participants, guilty or innocent. This coverage enshrines the lawyer celebrity who, while present in films, has been a particular staple of television drama.
If Dragnet is the type specimen for police shows, Perry Mason (CBS, 1957–66) is the type specimen for lawyers. Raymond Burr, who had appeared as a burly killer in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), became an invincible lawyer whose clients, persecuted by the police, were invariably innocent. In a weekly morality play that has survived decades more in reruns, Perry, his sidekick private eye and love-struck secretary skated on the edges of the law in order to find the truth, while others confessed to adultery fraud, greed and ultimately the murder. Prosecutors lost although justice was served.
Mason’s heroics questioned the efficiency if not the motives of police (although Burr later played a wheelchair-bound cop in Ironside), setting the stage for important dramas discussing major issues like The Defenders (CBS, 1961–5) and many lesser shows. Yet, if these could tap into 1960s suspicion of police and government, lawyers, too, were found to be more human and more diverse than the white male heroes who created the genre.
L.A. Law (NBC, 1986–94), a widely watched ensemble show of the 1980s, for example, jumbled office politics, courtrooms and bedrooms. In the 1990s, David Kelley’s The Practice (ABC, 1997–) makes ethical issues central to a sometimes shady firm and beleaguered District Attorney’s office, while Ally McBeal (FOX, 1997–)—the first hit show named after a female lawyer—treats law as a career/lifestyle rather than a crusade for justice. Again, human vulnerability and moral ambiguity are seen as essences of the law rather than as external hindrances: justice is one goal among many. Law and Order (NBC, 1990–) offers perhaps the most clear-cut moral universe, with its concentration on prosecutors making deals and losing cases).
The fictional narratives of crime and punishment of the 1990s, however, intersect with other media realities equally vulnerable and ambiguous. Extensive coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial and presidential scandals, as well as wider access to C-Span and Court TV, have made the uncertainties of real justice part of everyday life. “Courttainment” in which “real” judges (Judge Wappner, former New York City mayor Ed Koch, Judge “Judy”) decide real civil cases with sitcom spiels also blurring the structures of authority and truth that seemed so clear decades before.
Just as crime and punishment have been crucibles of social change and cultural meanings, whether on-screen or off-screen, the integration of women and minorities as major characters in police and law dramas (judges, lawyers and detectives, as well as criminals), the growing violence of stories and depictions, and the humanization of lawyers have all reflected changing attitudes and prepared these changes.
Industry:Culture
America witnessed a return of Dadaist practice in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. A liminal moment in the history of postwar American art, neo-Dada was at once a response to the presumed emotive possibilities of abstract expressionism, a challenge to the rigors of high modernist criticism, and a resurrection of early European modernism.
Despite the close collaboration of Rauschenberg and Johns during the 1950s, their work remained markedly distinct. Where Rauschenberg’s early “combines” looked back most emphatically to German Dada and the collaged work of Kurt Schwitters, Johns’ iconic flags, targets, maps and numbers resurrected the French Dadaist tradition of Marcel Duchamp. Further, where Rauschenberg’s early work asserted a deeply personal iconography amidst its array of art historical and pop cultural references, Johns’ early work insisted upon the resolute impersonality of the pictorial sign.
In the ensuing decades, Rauschenberg evacuated the personal from his surfaces, withdrawing from the photographic and allusive invocations of the self and foregoing the painterly gesture for the impersonality of the mechanically transferred, silkscreen image.
From the 1960s onwards, Rauschenberg’s work functions as an expansive visual archive of contemporary popular and political culture. Johns’ work, in contrast, has maintained its sustained painterly engagement in the contested status of the pictorial sign, even as it has adopted the pictorial strategies of repetition, tracing and appropriation. Reversing the trajectory of Rauschenberg’s work, Johns’ work has moved, albeit obliquely towards a more self-revelatory iconography of indexical trace and shadowy figural presence.
Industry:Culture
America’s fascination with crime permeates mass media. Indeed, critics frequently charge that media violence incites crime rather than reflecting it (evidence is murky).
Still, as movie plots, fodder for tabloid news, investigative reports, local news hype or “reality” shows, criminal activity investigation and prosecution permeate the everyday televisual world. These elements also have structured many long-running fictional genres, although, unlike film, the viewpoint of a criminal is rarely central. Hence, these series have created myths of good and evil for generations, while revealing changes and uncertainties about the nature of justice. Jack Webb’s Dragnet (NBC, 1952–9, 1967–70) altered radio models by its detailed focus on everyday police activity with a clear sense of authority (exaggerated in the revival that targeted countercultural elements). The show’s “realism” was reinforced by the solemn warning “the story you are about to be told is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent,” as well as the retribution that closed each show. Ironically Webb lionized the Los Angeles Police Department, whose racism and corruption would later spark major riots.
The hero cop continued for decades, including the noirish heritage and location shots of Naked City (ABC, 1958–9, 1960–3), period violence in The Untouchables (ABC, 1959–63), intergenerational dynamics in Streets of San Francisco (ABC, 1972–7) and the idiosyncracies of Kojak (CBS, 1973–89; ABC, 1989–90). Almost all these shows focus on detectives who unravel complex schemes amid increasing violence. Patrol cops faced tedium in Webb’s spin-off Adam-12 (NBC, 1968–75) and ridicule in Car 54, where are you? (NBC, 1961–3. Rural law met gentler humor in The Andy Griffith Show (CBS, 1960–8). Even the FBI had a hit show.
But were the police really friends and heroes? Even the radio heritage of the outsider private eye suggested police were not always just; others were there to cross the line, reopen the case and get the blonde an upright policeman, with whom she eventually could not be involved. Here, Peter Gunn (NBC, 1958–60, ABC 1960–1) was followed by Mannix, Cannon, Tanner, Baretta, etc. Aaron Spelling’s Charlie’s Angels (ABC, 1976– 81) showcased active albeit titillating females, while Remington Steele (NBC, 1982–6), Moonlighting (ABC, 1983–9) and others played up romance and detection. Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote (CBS, 1984–98) provided a senior detective with old-age appeal. Minorities have been relatively absent, apart from Sammo Hung and Arsenio Hall in Martial Law (ABC, 1999–2000), a black partner in Spenser: For Hire (ABC, 1985–8) and Burt Reynold’s Native American in Hawk.
Yet doubts and challenges also emerged within the police genre itself. The teenmarketed Mod Squad (ABC, 1968–73) turned a young woman and two angry youths, black and white, into police agents. Barney Miller (ABC, 1975–82) assembled diverse, jaded characters in a show where police work as comic relief. Lives, as well as process, became central to police drama.
This shift is frequently linked to Cagney and Lacey (CBS, 1982–8), which not only showcased female partnership, but also dealt with family issues, alcoholism and breast cancer. Ensemble complexity also permeates the creations of Steven Bochco and Thomas Milch, for example Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–7) and NYPD Blue (NBC, 1993–).
Male and female, black and white, police on the beat, detectives and lawyers alike lie, fear, act heroically and wrongly and in one experiment—Cop Rock (ABC, 1990)—even sang. Barry Levinson created a gritty human ensemble set in Balti-more, MD in Homicide (NBC, 1993–9), while enforcement and prosecution mesh in the 1990’s Law & Order (NBC, 1990–), hewing close to current news. The raw police sexuality of NYPD Blue stands light years away, physically and emotionally from Dragnet. Nor is justice easy or cases closed in a single episode.
Other action/crime genres also appeared sporadically on television. The 1960s saw secret agents enforcing justice worldwide in I Spy (NBC, 1965–8), where Bill Cosby pioneered black lead roles, Mission Impossible (CBS, 1966–73; ABC, 1988–90), enforcing a “Dragnet” morality against dictators worldwide, the Bondish Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964–8) and the wise-cracking Get Smart (NBC, 1965–9; CBS, 1969– 70). This genre faded notably after the Vietnam War and Watergate. Superheroes also have shown up when police cannot help—especially in Saturday morning cartoons.
The year of 1989 also saw the debut of FOX’s “Realityshow,” Cops (FOX, 1969), with cinéma vérité handheld videos and apparently unedited footage of police life and events on the street. Here, the “unvarnished truth” restates many of the concerns of class and race that fictional shows had first hidden and then, perhaps too readily embraced.
In all these shows, fighting crime is not just fighting evil-doers. Police chafe against rules (echoing conservative debates about the Supreme Court decisions), criticize lawyers and judges, and sometimes pause to reflect on society gone wrong. In these themes and the human dramas they play out, these shows reflect and shape the discourse of crime and punishment in contemporary society.
Industry:Culture
America’s greatest contribution to world theater to date is indisputably the twentiethcentury musical. The American musical entertains audiences from London to Tokyo.
Americans who never patronize other live theater inevitably will attend at least one musical, be it a Broadway touring show or their daughter’s high-school play At the beginning of the twentieth century musical theater was romantic comedy complemented by song and dance numbers not necessarily related to the plot. Long on spectacle and short on substance, such musical comedies as Cole Porter’s Anything Goes entertained audiences across the nation. The first half of the twentieth century saw steady growth in the sophistication and the popularity of the genre, culminating in the heyday of the Broadway musical in the 1950s and 1960s. While plays continued to employ lavish spectacle, song and dance, the storylines (books) were becoming more complex, the characters more developed and themes tinged with serious social issues. In 1943 Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein created Oklahoma with a fully developed plot and songs and dances that served to further the story This advent of the integrated musical was followed by a flurry of blockbuster hits from Rogers and Hammerstein (Carousel, South Pacific, The Kïng and I). Lerner and Lowe (Brigadoon, My Fair Lady), Leonard Bernstein (On the Town, West Side Story) and Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls) are members of a long list of artists who contributed to the golden age of American musical theater. This uniquely American form naturally became a major cultural export, and, by the 1980s, British and French lyricists and composers (Andrew Lloyd Webber, Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg) had developed their own hybrid forms of musical theater to be reimported for long runs on Broadway.
By the middle of the twentieth century American mainstream, non-musical drama had settled into two popular genres. Fourth-wall realism abounded in the form of romantic comedies and “kitchen sink” dramas (usually set in one room of a home and centered around the personal, often family, conflicts of the central characters). These plays often depicted the American dream gone awry. Tennessee Williams wrote about the displaced aristocracy or pseudo-aristocracy (exemplified by heroines like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire) of the new South. Arthur Miller, in Death of a Salesman, brought audiences a painfully honest portrayal of the common person as tragic hero.
Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 hit, A Raisin in the Sun, is an African American variation on this theme. Set in an urban America caught in the growing pains of desegregation and centered around one family’s encounter with racial discrimination in housing, it enjoyed a successful Broadway run (ironically to mostly segregated audiences), winning its author a Pulitzer Prize.
Realistic drama has survived through the century manifested later in plays by such authors as August Wilson, who has chronicled the dreams and frustrations of African Americans in plays set in each decade of the century While Wilson’s plays are largely linear realism, they are unique in the use of rich poetic language.
Neil Simon is the most commercially successful contemporary creator of the romantic comedy version of dramatic realism. His comedies from the 1960s, such as Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple, have endured with regular performances at dinner and community theaters. His prolific and popular body of work also includes the autobiographical comic dramas Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues, both written in the 1980s, which look at life from the perspective of growing up Jewish in America.
Several of Simon’s plays, along with many other authors’ plays in the realist genre, have been turned into films. It could be argued that they are just as, if not more, suited to that medium with its ability to create a sense in the audience of eavesdropping on a private world.
Since the expressionist movement at the start of the twentieth century fourth-wall realism has shared the American stage with more selfreferential, non-realistic forms.
Many contemporary American playwrights turned away from linear plot structures (in which each event seems inevitably to trigger the next, building to a predestined climax) to a style that celebrates the live and immediate audience/performer relationship. These plays often purposely draw attention to the means of production, constantly reminding the audience that they are watching a play instead of reality Many of the authors who have embraced this presentational style (inspired by the groundbreaking work of German playwright Bertolt Brecht) find it more suitable for framing the political and social critiques inherent in their works. Asian American playwright David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly, draws a parallel between the sexist attitudes of patriarchal culture and the racist attitudes of the Western world towards the “exotic” East. Hwang uses several devices that highlight the artificial nature of performance: the main character narrates the story speaking directly to the audience; several of the actors play more than one role; the play leaps backwards and forwards in time rather than following a linear plot line. These devices serve to remind the audience that they are watching a performance, and, by de-emphasizing plot, the play steers the audience’s attention to the social and political issues behind the dramatic events.
Some playwrights, such as Edward Albee and Sam Shepard, mix elements of realism with surreal and absurd events to create their own deliberate distortions of the American dream. Albee’s works often focus on the behaviors of the East Coast privileged class, while Shepard deromanticizes the frontier spirit of the West. Other theater artists, such as Robert Wilson, create works that stretch the boundaries of nearly every definition of “theatre” by staging works that might last up to 23 hours (Ka Mountain, 1973), dispense with storyline altogether and are as much visual art as text-based drama.
These departures from realism are, in part, reactions against the realism of film and television. Because the camera can establish verisimilitude so much more effectively, many contemporary playwrights have sought to create forms that integrate and embrace the uniquely live nature of the theater experience.
Industry:Culture
America’s tobacco industry has a long, profitable history Virginia colonist John Rolfe (Pocahantas’ husband) produced the first commercial crop in 1612. In 1890 James Buchanan Duke founded the American Tobacco Company (ATC). A 1902 merger with Britain’s Imperial Tobacco Company created the British-American Tobacco Company (BAT). In 1911 the US Supreme Court dissolved Duke’s monopoly into several smaller companies, including R.J. Reynolds (RJR), Liggett & Myers (L&M), American Tobacco (AT) and Weyman-Burton. The other major tobacco manufacturers, Lorillard, Philip Morris (PM) and Brown & Williamson (B&W), formed in the 1930s.
Cigarette sales grew steadily until the early 1950s when stories about health risks to smokers proliferated. In 1964 the US Surgeon General’s report Smoking and Health concluded that smoking was a health hazard. In 1965 the US Congress began requiring the Surgeon General’s warning on all cigarette packages. The year 1971 brought a ban on broadcast tobacco-product advertising. By 1990 all interstate buses and domestic airline flights banned smoking.
The tobacco industry reacted to these changes by diversifying and expanding internationally. PM, manufacturer of Marlboro and Virginia Slims, led both trends. Its major domestic purchases included Miller beer, General Foods and Kraft. RJR, manufacturer of Camel, went into foil products, oil and food operations. In 1986, the company became RJR-Nabisco. AT, maker of Pall Mall and Lucky Strike, diversified into liquor and golf brands, changing its name to American Brands in 1969. American Brands left the tobacco business after B&W bought Gallaher, its cigarette division, and changed its name again to Fortune Brands in 1997. Still controlled by parent company BAT, B&W, maker of Kool, diversified relatively late. Its acquisitions included the elite retail department store Saks Fifth Avenue. Lorillard, maker of Newport, was purchased in 1968 by the Loews Corporation, which also owns insurance company CNA Financial Corporation. L&M, maker of Chesterfield and Lark, successfully diversified into petfood products and alcohol, becoming the Liggett Group in 1964. In 1980 Grand Metropolitan Limited took over L&M, reducing its presence in the tobacco industry.
These changes reduced the original “Big Six” cigarette manufacturers to the “Big Four.” Meanwhile, chewing tobacco manufacturer United States Tobacco (formerly Weyman Burton), producer of Copenhagen and Skoal, branched into wine, cigars and entertainment programming.
The tobacco industry faced increasing legal pressure in the 1990s. In 1994, led by Mississippi, the states began suing the tobacco industry to recoup tobacco-related Medicaid costs. In October 1996, Congress passed the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) rule to regulate tobacco, especially sales and marketing aimed at minors.
Liggett also broke ranks with the industry in 1996, eventually settling with five states over Medicaid suits and releasing internal documents. In 1997 the industry negotiated a national tobacco settlement with the state Attorneys General, prompting Congress to consider legislation to regulate the industry. Further suits and strategies continue to challenge the industry in the US, including a $145 billion judgement in Florida (2000) against these manufacturers.
Industry:Culture
American anthropology studies the human condition across cultures in both the past and present, as well as considers the primate family in general. For most of the twentieth century this “holistic perspective” fostered a “four-field approach,” including archaeological, physical, linguistic and cultural anthropology. What held the four fields together was the concept of “culture”—whether embodied in the material remains of past human activity, the physical attributes of Homo sapiens, or their relatives and ancestors, as a guide for human action or media of meaning and interpreting experience.
The four-field approach emerged from earlier natural histories that sought to catalogue in genealogical relationships all observable elements of nature, including humans.
Anthropology concerned itself with non-western peoples, the “simple societies of the primitive world,” while sociology became the study of “modern complex societies of the West.” In America, the readily available nonwestern subjects were American Indians, while British and French anthropology examined social structure and meaning among colonized peoples.
In recent years the four-field approach has become the source of heated debate, with many academic departments abandoning it as an organizing principle. Increasing specialization and cross-disciplinary ties have contributed to this. Perhaps most significant to this fragmentation is a divide between those who embrace anthropology as a “science” and those who link it to a challenge to Eurocentric meta-narratives that include science itself as a subject of study.
Because of its cross-cultural, multi-temporal, relativist perspective, anthropologists have always considered all phenomena on their own terms, whether employing the comparative method or seeking universal or particular features. In the late 1960s and the 1970s other academic disciplines of study particularly the humanities, began to look to anthropology for theoretical orientations that became pivotal in “de-centering” conventions of study that refracted unequal relations of power, Euro- and ethnocentric.
Yet, the anthropological perspective did not play much of a role in the “culture wars” that followed (Rosaldo 1994).
American anthropology continues to reflect and shape social forms and practices in the study of the human condition. Once holding the contradictory position as a handmaiden of the European and American colonial enterprise while acting as advocate of nonwestern peoples in the face of imperialism, anthropology now is a contested site in the contemporary politics of identity. Local and global flows, displacements, and reintegrations of populations which have produced ethnic politics as a site of contestation, and a fragmented “social imaginary” (Appadurai 1996) are both the subjects of contemporary anthropology and the cause of some of its recent theoretical and practical reformations.
The face of American anthropology is increasingly female and increasingly “other” (see Behar and Gordon 1995). Post-colonial theorists from what once were the peripheries of the EuroAmerican core also have entered the anthropological enterprise.
Anthropology as a “science,” the notion of holism, the comparative method, the culture concept, relativism, fieldwork, analytical and interpretative frameworks, and forms of textual presentations have all come under attack as symptoms of an inequality in power relations between western and non-western peoples, places and spaces.
This critique of anthropology often referred to as the “crisis of representation” (Marcus and Fischer 1986) has led to ill-feeling among anthropologists. Contemporary American anthropology is increasingly seen to be a cultural anthropology that often includes linguistic anthropology, with archaeology and physical anthropology aligned with each other or completely separated. Some archaeologists and physical anthropologists, meanwhile, believe that cultural anthropology has lost its subject—culture—to other disciplines, which has led to its demise as a subfield.
What relevance does anthropology have for contemporary American culture? More so than ever before anthropologists, particularly cultural anthropologists, are engaging in research here at “home.” Medical anthropology, practice anthropology and its problemsolving orientation, urban ethnographies, film and media studies, a revitalized partnership with folklore and folk-life studies, and an interest on the part of the corporate world in anthropology have brought it closer to the surface of public culture.
Industry:Culture
American apocalyptics who express their rejection of issues or changes by choosing to withdraw from American society and await its destruction, armed with tools of both living and conquest. While such groups were exacerbated by Y2K anxieties, their choice of life in a wilderness, individual values over collectivity and a highly personal (small collective) vision of the American dream has clear antecedents in both Utopian and reformist groups. The dilemma in the late twentieth century in fact, was where one went and what one did to survive.
Industry:Culture
American art in public spaces, not surprisingly has been dominated by memorials of war and politics—generals, presidents or obelisks and sorrowful figures recalling the fallen.
Washington, DC, for example, takes on trappings of a mausoleum in the monumental neo-classical structures on and around the mall commemorating Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson, as well as statues of state heroes huddled in the Capitol. Additional space on the mall has been found for recognition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a controversial Vietnam memorial by Maya Lin. At a local scale, public art dominates busy crossroads and provides aesthetic/historical touches to squares, parks, cemeteries and gardens.
While generally planned as monuments to shared history beliefs and sentiments, public art can also prove divisive. Civil-War monuments to the Confederate dead in the South have become controversial since the civil-rights era. A proposal to add a statue of tennis great Arthur Ashe to Richmond’s all-white Monument Avenue brought protests from both conservative whites and the Ashe family Political memorials in urban statuary or renamings also rekindle controversies and enmities. Overall, an inherited bias towards white males in memorialization (and choice of artists) also reifies divisions of rights to history that have been challenged since the 1960s.
The presence and meaning of public art in the early twenty-first century is also linked to special programs for public support of the arts, primarily for art initiatives established by cities and states nationwide (ranging from 0.5 to 2 percent) since the 1970s. The National Endowment for the Arts also has sponsored public-arts programs. These initiatives have forced and cajoled government projects as well as private developers to set aside moneys to pose new works in new public spaces, whether administrative offices, entrance plazas, hospitals or airports. Again, this has not been without controversy— Richard Serra’s abstract curve Tilted Arc, in front of the Federal Plaza in New York, was removed in 1989 after complaints about its impact on the space.
Public art also has become associated with urban regeneration and revitalization. But some have argued that while its presence may be public, even the possibilities of interpretation of postmodern forms create stratification in appreciation and responses to the work. Surveillance and campaigns against vandalism also betray multiple visions of monuments and spaces around them within complex urban fabrics. Arts in “controlled” public spaces, moreover, point out that malls and other public forums have private owners and rules of access and use. Urban murals, while widespread in programs for neighborhood beautification, also have been decried as markers of urban decay that simultaneously mask and call attention to abandonment. If art is the mirror of the soul, public art reflects both visions and divisions of American community.
Industry:Culture
American art since the late 1970s has been characterized by both supporters and detractors as postmodern, but it is sometimes unclear whether the term refers to the contemporary social context of media-saturated global capitalism, or to new artistic styles. The question is complicated by the diversity of practices that the term has been used to identify Some leading artists have elaborated or departed from aspects of minimalism, pop art and conceptual art to develop art that is critical of both specifically artistic and broader social institutions. This work, often in hybrid forms known as installation art, and sometimes site-specific (made for a particular space), characteristically employs photography, ready-made objects and materials, and texts.
Key figures include Hans Haacke, Jenny Hoizer, Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman.
Other artists have taken the proliferating commodities of consumer culture (see consumerism) as their material; among them are Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Allan McCollum. Critical supporters of these kinds of postmodern art see it as theoretically sophisticated, while detractors see it as mere illustration of theory. Some of this work was influenced by feminism. which provided one of the models for work in the 1990s grounded in and meant both to express and complicate specific ethnic or sexual identities, by African American artists, including David Hammons and Fred Wilson, Native American artists, including Jimmie Durham, and gay artists, including Robert Gober. But the 1980s also saw a return to painting, characterized alternately by a pastiche of historical styles (David Salle), or a full-blown and sometimes overblown expressionism (Julian Schnabel).
Industry:Culture
