Extract
Jeffrey Lieber’s Flintstone Modernism is a collection of three wide-ranging essays on American popular culture in the post-war decades, focussing not only on institutional and state-sponsored architecture of the 1950s and ’60s, but also on wide-release Hollywood films (specifically the so-called ‘sword-and-sandal’ blockbuster epics) as viewed through the lens of contemporary criticism by ‘public intellectuals’ and others commentators. This body of evidence, as Lieber convincingly demonstrates, sheds new light on post-war debates about totalitarianism and democracy, highlighting the ambivalent views of many critics toward history and the need for ‘timelessness’ in modern architecture and culture. Thus, Lieber begins by quoting Hannah Arendt’s over-heated commentaries on the damaging and pervasive influence of newly empowered (and newly wealthy) American audiences and their demands for ‘entertainment’ instead of genuinely valuable ‘cultural objects’: in the 1950s, Arendt wrote and lectured widely about the ‘crisis of culture’ precipitated by the weakness and opportunism of artists and clients who pandered to the ‘gargantuan appetites’ and low-brow tastes of American consumers. As readers of this journal know well, by the end of that decade, such recriminations were frequently repeated, not only in literary magazines like The New Yorker and Partisan Review, but also in the very newspapers, magazines, and television shows voraciously consumed by American audiences. Blame and shame about middle- and working-class taste and culture had thus become not merely commonplace, but also—and more dangerously—an enervated cliché of American cultural criticism and self-definition. Many, like Arendt, blamed consumers themselves for the lack of character that favoured empty pleasure over moral or artistic self-improvement; others blamed the ‘failure of the avant-gardes’ who had abandoned the cultural field of play after the war, opening the floodgates to kitsch, advertising, and the empty distractions of fandom and glamour.
