The power of art,the power of entertainment

The importance of power in studying the media

Horkheimer and Adorno’s 1944 work on the ‘culture industries’ in The Dialectic of Enlightenment provides an important stepping on point for debates about media and power. In this germinal work, the philosophers insist that in understanding the work of mass culture the question of ‘power’ is a vital one:

the power of the culture industry resides in its identification with a manufactured need … the stronger the positions of the culture industry become, the more summarily it can deal with consumers’ needs, producing them, controlling them, disciplining them. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972 [1944]: 137)

This work was paradigm-setting. It provided a way to think about the functioning of mass (or popular) culture that stepped away from the straightforward snobbery of an F.R. Leavis or a T.S. Eliot (Carey, 1992: 7). While those writers employed paradigms which despised mass culture precisely for reflecting its consumers, and showing that they were indeed a ‘complacent, prejudiced, unthinking mass’ (Carey, 1992: 7), Horkheimer and Adorno’s project works somewhat differently. They do not despise the ‘mass’ of humanity – indeed they want to speak on their behalf. But they do despise mass culture. By introducing the concept of ‘power’ they can achieve this intellectual move. Mass culture, they argue, does not represent the masses. It is imposed on the masses by capitalist institutions that have the ‘power’ to control what is seen.

‘Power’ has become a central topic for thinking about the role of the media and its relationship to various class fractions. Recent debates about media and ‘relations of power’ (Hay and Couldry, 2011: 480) have particularly focused on the increased audio-visual productivity and distributory possibilities allowed to citizens by digital participation, but they are still centrally concerned with ‘the important issues of power and control … in the Web 2.0 environment’ (Bird, 2011: 502). Participants in these debates have tended to sit within one of two familiar strands – the first strand often labelled ‘optimistic’ (Bird, 2011: 507) or ‘celebratory’ (Ornebring, 2007: 449), the second commonly described as ‘critical’ (Hartley, 2009: 232) or ‘pessimistic’ (Flew, 2009: 92). Optimistic writers see a change occurring in power relations, in a ‘general trend of the increasing power of audiences in the entertainment industries’ (McNamara, 2011: 526). They suggest that ‘new media are increasingly putting the power to create and distribute content into the hands of the audience’ (Napoli, 2011: 1) and that audiences ‘increasingly have the power to affect the content they consume’ (Napoli, 2011: 77). By contrast, pessimistic writers insist on the importance of ‘wider power structures’ (Hay and Couldry, 2011: 483) and assert that ‘the past two decades have offered little sign of such a shift in power’ (Couldry, 2011: 497–8).

But what does the word mean? As is to be expected of a term that has been used by thousands of academic writers over a period of many decades, the term ‘power’ is a polyvalent one. In the writing of Adorno and Horkheimer the term seems to be all-encompassing. The impression one gets from reading their work is that the cultural industries are, simply, powerful; the masses are, simply, powerless. This is a model of power as, ‘totalized and abstracted’, ‘a single, objective social phenomenon’ (Gibson, 2007: 183, 69, 73). But in ongoing debates about this topic it is in fact common to find references to a whole range of different powers: ‘economic power’ (Andrejevic, 2011: 617), for example, or ‘institutional power’ (Couldry, 2011: 495), ‘the power of media producers’ (Bird, 2011: 506), ‘cultural power’ (Turner, 2009: 25), ‘media power’ (Madianou, 2012: 12), ‘structural power’ (Turner, 2009: 46), or ‘structural media power’ (Bird, 2011: 509), ‘governmental and corporate power’ (Maxwell and Miller, 2011: 592), ‘the power of the military-industrial-entertainment-academic complex’ (Maxwell and Miller, 2011: 594), ‘the power of data-crunching and predictive analytics’ (Andrejevic, 2011: 618), ‘sovereign and network powers’ (Bratich, 2011: 622), ‘direct power to shape media content’ (Bratich, 2011: 623), ‘the bullying power of commercial interests’ (Banet-Weiser, 2011: 651), ‘the power to represent’ (Madianou, 2012: 6), ‘purchasing power’ (Yang, 2009: 528), ‘labor power’ (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010: 26) or ‘symbolic power’ (Flew, 2008: 2008) .

Nevertheless, despite this proliferation of kinds of power, there remains in much of this analysis a tendency finally to fall back on to the idea that all of these expressions of power are expressions of a single essential substance, whose distribution between various parties can simply be measured as a ‘simple quantitative phenomenon’ (Hindess, quoted in Gibson, 2007: 29). Take, for example, Bird’s formulation of the question of ‘produsers’ (consumers who also produce online): ‘has this shift in power really happened, or does the celebration of the online produser simply mask the ever-increasing power of the media industry?’ (Bird, 2011: 507). As many writers understand the situation – and it is true of pessimistic writers in particular – the distribution of power is a zero-sum game: if one agent gains, another must lose, and ‘ultimately’ (Ornebring, 2007,: 2007), one agent must have more power.

But Mark Gibson notes that some academic traditions have tended to not to talk of ‘“power” in general terms, but more concretely about specific “powers”’ (2007: x). As a way of thinking about the importance of this move he draws on the work of Barry Hindess to suggest the existence of ‘heterogeneous powers’. Imagine, for example, ‘an international dispute in which tanks are pitted against submarines’ (Hindess, quoted in Gibson, 2007: 31). Who would prevail? It depends of course on whether the powers are engaged in land or sea battle. Some kinds of power are more useful – more powerful – in some situations; other forms of power in others.

Such a move answers the call of several recent writers on media and power (see Baym and Burnett, 2009: 445; Deuze, 2007: 258–9; Gibson, 2007: 167). Verstraete calls for researchers to move beyond:

these old utopia versus dystopia dyads … since these simple oppositions between power and resistance prevent us from seeing the complexities of today’s transformations in cultural participation. (2011: 539)

This article contributes to the process of moving beyond the dyad of optimism and pessimism to attempt to trace what kinds of power are offered to producers and to consumers in the production, distribution and consumption of different kinds of culture.

Art, entertainment and audiences

Although in much academic research there is an implication that ‘the media’ all work in the same way to exert power over consumers, in fact there exist different forms of mediated culture which are produced, distributed and consumed differently, and which involve different relations of power between producers and consumers. One key distinction is that between art and entertainment.

Before the 19th century, upper- and lower-class citizens in Western countries shared common cultural resources (Storey, 2003: 4). Shakespeare, for example, was presented as popular entertainment. But over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries cultural elites worked explicitly to separate their cultural consumption from that of the masses and the binary of ‘art’ versus ‘entertainment’ was introduced. These forms of culture have different aesthetic systems (McKee, 2012). The binary has never been simple, and in the course of the 20th century it has been modified in a number of ways – particularly with questions about cultural omnivorousness as a marker of cultural capital (Warde et al., 2007) and postmodern art practices (Indiana, 2010) and theories of culture (Jameson, 1991). Nevertheless the distinction retains an important position in the production and distribution of culture. Indeed, Scheff and Kotler (1996) argue that adherence to one or other side of the low versus high culture paradigm determines both the fundamental orientation and business performance of creative organisations. And in the everyday practice of culture the distinction is made as an ongoing practice (Blake, 2012: 10; Goldsworthy, 2012: 34; Morris, 2012: 30).

As art was separated out from entertainment – ‘the sacralization of culture’ (Levine, 1988: 83) – a key element of this process involved changing the relationship between audiences and the text (Storey, 2002). When Shakespeare was presented as entertainment, audiences were rowdy and interactive. But when entertainment was turned into art, this became a problem:

Nothing seems to have troubled the new arbiters of culture more than the nineteenth-century practice of spontaneous expressions of pleasure and disapproval in the form of cheers, yells, gesticulations, hisses, boos, stamping of feet, whistling, crying for encores, and applause.… In 1895 George Gladden compared applause to the clashing together of spears, shields and battle axes by primitive savages. (Levine, 1988: 192)

The champions of the new, ‘sacralized’ model of culture set about ‘disciplining and training audiences’ (Levine, 1988: 184), working to:

render audiences docile, willing to accept what the experts deemed appropriate rather than play a role themselves in determining either the repertory or the manner of presentation. (1988: 189)

The audiences for entertainment are rowdy. The audiences for art are ‘docile’. What does this tell us about the power relations between producers and consumers in these different forms of culture?

Power to manage one’s own body and contribute to a text

Starting with a model of heterogeneous powers, there is an infinite number of powers one could discuss in relation to various forms of culture. To begin I return to the example Levine raises – of bodily performance in response to a text. This fundamental starting point has broad implications for media and power. There are distinctions between what consumers are expected to do with their bodies at live performances of art and live performances of entertainment. In all consumption of culture audiences have control over whether they look or listen at a particular form of culture, whether they stay to consume it or leave. But the regimes of art and entertainment encourage them to perform their presence differently. In their physical comportment at a live entertainment event, audiences are encouraged to be physically active – to be loud and to move around. In their comportment at an art event, they are expected to be ‘docile’ – to sit silently and still.

This point is not made frivolously. It leads us to another form of power – the power to contribute to the cultural text itself. Rowdiness is a form of communication. To attend a rock concert with a large audience is clearly a different cultural form from listening to a recording of a band – or even, were it possible, from listening to the band perform live if you were the only person in the room. But this is not so obviously true of the audience at a symphony concert. Indeed, at a symphony concert it could be argued that other members of the audience are an inconvenience. Coughs or mobile phones ringing are anathema. Other members of the audience are prized to the extent to which they manage to absent themselves. When Arturo Toscanini conducted at the Metropolitan Opera, he ‘interrupted a performance of Weber’s Euryanthe to rap with his baton until the whispering stopped’ (Levine, 1988: 188). When a consumer of art changes the text itself (leading to the conductor pausing a performance), they are chastised for doing so. It is improper behaviour. Consumers of art are – or should be, ideally – powerless to change the text. It is only when the offender has been told off, and done what he is told – stopped whispering, thus being returned to a position of powerlessness – that the performance can continue.

Compare this with the way in which audiences of live entertainment can use their activity – which is encouraged by the producers – to alter the text of the cultural event itself. Washington Irving wrote of 19th-century entertainment audiences that:

The good folks in the gallery have all the trouble of ordering the music. When the orchestra’s selection displeased them, they stamped, hissed, roared, whistled and groaned in cadence until the musicians played Moll in the Wad, Tally ho the grinders, and several other airs more suited to their tastes. (Levine, 1988: 26)

It is still true today that in the creation of art, audiences must be silenced:

At a concert in Manhattan last week, the New York Philharmonic orchestra had just reached the heart-wrenching final passages of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, when a mobile phone began to ring from the front row. It rang, and rang. Apoplectic, the conductor halted the orchestra mid-note. As the audience began to bay for blood, still the phone chirruped. The conductor leant from the podium and curtly spoke to the offender. Finally, as if coming out of a trance, the man reached into his pocket and switched it off. (Goring, 2012: 15)

Concomitantly, it remains the problem of entertainment for many cultural critics that the audience continues to interrupt:

I had the misfortune to attend Pavarotti’s concert in Hyde Park.… I moved to various spots searching for a place from which he could be heard to best advantage. In every place the majority reaction of the audience was the same – they talked, joked and laughed and occasionally jumped up and down to see if they could see Pavarotti on the stage, pausing only to produce thunderous applause at the end of each aria.… At the end he was vociferously applauded. Clearly the audience loved him; whether they like opera is something else again. (quoted in Storey, 2002: 43)

The distinction between proper behaviour for the consumers of art and for consumers of entertainment retains a hold in the models of cultural production and distribution.

The audience’s part in creating the aesthetic system of entertainment

In the ‘art’ model of culture, the text has ‘the power’ over the audience – it can even change the nature of the consumer by raising them to ‘a higher spiritual level’. This model also survives into the 21st century: for some cultural critics the defining characteristic of ‘art’, as opposed to entertainment, is that it can ‘change lives’ (Morris, 2012: 30). Entertainment does not do this. Entertainment does not ‘linger too long in the mind’ (Morris, 2012: 30). If the underlying relationship of power for art is that the text changes the consumer, in entertainment the fundamental logic is precisely the opposite – the consumer changes the text. This can happen directly, as when the audience calls out songs for a singer to perform. But it is also important to acknowledge that the whole system of entertainment is based upon producers trying to understand audiences. This involves not just the individual instances of feedback: but a system whereby the feedback of previous generations of consumers is drawn upon by producers who want to give the audience what it wants. We can identify a distinct aesthetic system of entertainment – the characteristics that make for successful entertainment products: vulgarity, story, seriality and adaptation, happy endings, interactivity, a fast and loud aesthetic, spectacle, emotion and fun (McKee, 2012). It is audiences that have created this aesthetic system. Levine notes that when Shakespeare was presented as entertainment, taking on board the feedback of audiences: ‘Some of the alterations bordered on the spectacular, such as the flying, singing witches in Macbeth’ (Levine, 1988: 42). One impresario ‘devised a happy ending for [King Lear] … a love affair between Edgar and Cordelia and allowed Cordelia and Lear to live’ (Levine, 1988: 44). Levine suggests that, unlike the situation with the production of art as culture, entertainment gives some element of power over the content of the text to the audience:

When in 1826 actor James T Hackett chided his fellow actor Edmund Kean about his choice of Tate’s ending [to King Lear] rather than Shakespeare’s, Kean replied that he had attempted to restore the original, ‘but when I had ascertained that a large majority of the public – whom we live to please and must please to be popular – liked Tate better than Shakespeare, I fell back upon the prevailing corruption; though in my soul I was ashamed of the prevailing taste’. (Levine, 1988: 44)

In the case of mediated culture, how does entertainment know its audiences? This question is worth exploring for thinking about the distribution of power between media and its audiences. ‘Media’ can function perfectly well under the cultural logic of either art or entertainment. The film director Jean-Luc Godard, for example, works comfortably within the art model of culture, insisting that ‘films are made for one or maybe two people’ (quoted in Puttman and Watson, 1998: 232). As the literary author Martin Amis puts it:

the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. (Amis, quoted in Page, 2011)

But it is also possible for mediated culture to work within the entertainment model – seeking out the reactions of consumers and including that in the production process. It is common sense, for example, to assert that audiences of Hollywood movies do indeed have power over the content – indeed, too much power, as we hear in complaints about ‘the tyranny of focus groups’ (Lawson, 2011: 34):

[Fatal Attraction] originally had a rather arty conclusion, in which the woman, played by Glenn Close, commits ritual suicide as she listens to a recording of Madame Butterfly. Preview audiences rejected the ending as unsatisfying, however, and … Paramount Pictures had the director, Adrian Lyne, reshoot it. In the revision, Ms. Close’s character and her paramour, played by Michael Douglas, have a violent struggle in which she is nearly drowned in a bathtub and is finally dispatched by a gunshot fired by his wife (Anne Archer). With the new ending, Fatal Attraction … earned more than $300 million in box-office receipts worldwide. (Weber, 2011: 16)

Of course there are complex questions of epistemology here. A test audience is not ‘the’ audience. ‘The audience’ is an abstract entity representing all consumers:

In no case is the audience ‘real’, or external to its discursive construction. There is no ‘actual’ audience that lies beyond its production as a category, which is merely to say that audiences are only ever encountered per se as representations. (Hartley, 1992: 105)

So I am not saying that focus groups accurately represent the audience – such as claim would be meaningless. Rather, I argue that they represent the desire of entertainment producers to seek the input of consumers in the production process. This happens in a number of ways.

First, the audience contributes through producers’ historical knowledge of what has succeeded before. Creatives are valued in Hollywood to the extent that they know what audiences want to see. There exists a whole industry for analysing films that have previously been successful with audiences and drawing out the common elements – books like Robert McKee’s Story (McKee, 1998), for example.

Second, as noted above, Hollywood has a system of test screenings and focus groups which seek to find out directly from audiences what they want in a film. Of course these do not transparently tell producers what ‘audiences’ think. They are limited by the same epistemological issues that constrain all qualitative research: the ways in which questions are worded constrain responses (McKee, 2003: 86), the personal interactions and power relations between members of focus groups push responses in particular directions (McLachlan, 2005: 116), the analysis of data can never be objective in any straightforward way (McKee, 2004: 204–5) and, of course, the bugbear of ‘representativeness’ is always present (McKee, 2005: 77). But producers want to overcome these obstacles – they want to find ways to involve consumers in the production of the content.

Third, when each film is released its performance is tracked in detail – how much money did it make, over what period, on how many screens, what merchandise was released and how well did it sell, for example.

These processes are not the same thing as giving the audience a camera and letting them shoot their own film. They push the production of entertainment towards being acts of co-creation. A whole book could be written about the relative input of various actors into the creation of such a text – the audiences who have gone before and set the limits on what they want to see, the creatives who are also part of ‘the audience’, the focus groups who comment on drafts of the product. But for the purposes of this argument it is necessary only to note that entertainment as a cultural system wants the audience to play a more important role in the creation process than does art. Of course we are not talking about absolute free agency for entertainment audiences – as if there ever were such a thing. As well as what the audience wants, Hollywood film producers also deal with the prime importance of making a profit – so there are always practical limitations of what can be seen on film, and whether enough people want to see something to make it commercially viable. The classification and wider legal systems of any given country put constraints on what can be shown, and this will impact, to varying degrees, on the production process (Butler, 2012). The institutional and work cultures lead to certain kinds of production, as do wider economic conditions such as the move to freelancing and contracted labour (Caldwell, 2008). The histories of ideas and genres create the culture within which it is possible to think. But still, accepting that all of this is true, entertainment wants to give the audience what the audience wants. Art wants to give the audience what the artist wants. Of course, in practice, no individual moment of cultural creation will be as pure as this schema suggests. But hopefully I have in this commentary provided sufficient evidence to show that there exist different structures, and that there is a difference between Paramount Pictures and Jean-Luc Godard in their attitude towards audience input in the production process.

Power over the range of cultural choices available

In this final section I return to a number of points that have been made in this commentary in order to draw out their implications for understanding the large-scale systems of mediated cultural production. I would contend that a familiarity with the difference between art and entertainment as models for the production, distribution and consumption of culture speaks to another form of power that has exercised media researchers. Verstraete, for example, argues that:

giants such as Time Warner Inc., Google, but also Yahoo, Microsoft, Vodafone, T-Mobile have enormous power in deciding what entertainment, information and communication services will be available in what forms, with which content. (2011: 536)

This is a common argument in academic writing about media and power: although consumers might have control over the uses they make of texts, researchers argue that the power over what texts actually get made and distributed still remains with the media companies who produce them (Bird, 2011: 508; Bratich, 2011: 623; Costello and Moore, 2007: 140; Johnson, 2007: 77; Knaggs, 2011: 400; Madianou, 2012: 6; Ornebring, 2007: 458). As I have suggested in this commentary, this claim does not take account of different forms of cultural production: the concerns of possible consumers of Fatal Attraction, for example, were listened to by its makers more than the concerns of possible consumers of Jean-Luc Godard’s films. Given that this is the case, why have researchers continued to see the producers of entertainment as having ultimate power over the content of material that they produce? I suspect that the reason for this can be traced to the different ways of seeing audiences in the entertainment and art paradigms. The art paradigm suggests that consumers should consume what they are given. The ideal arts consumer – if anyone ever managed to inhabit this role – would be ‘docile’ and take whatever they were given by the experts, whether they liked it or not. I suggest that many writers on media and power are working within the ‘art’ paradigm for culture – they see all audiences as art audiences – as ‘docile’ audiences. But this misunderstands the nature of the audiences of entertainment – and thus the way in which entertainment is produced. Entertainment works on the principle of ‘giving the public what it wants’ (Carey, 1992: 6). In this paradigm, audience members are ill-disciplined. They wander away from a piece of culture if they are not interested. If the artist does not offer what they want then they seek it out in other places.

The history of British radio provides a particularly telling example of this fact. Until 1973 there was no legal commercial ‘entertainment’ radio in the UK (Fleming, 2009: 12–13). The BBC had a monopoly on radio in Britain, with a ‘public service’ remit to produce material that audiences should want – not necessarily what they did want. Like the cultural reformers who created the category of art, the BBC’s Reithian project excluded such trivial material as the pop charts. As rock and roll music developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s: ‘BBC policy makers continued to go about their cultural missionary work much as they always had done’ (Chapman, 1992: 1):

The Light Programme could embrace trad jazz and skiffle readily enough, as these satisfied existing cultural criteria, while on the Home Service or the Third Programme the music could be transformed into a series of genre options, classified, made respectable, appreciated rather than enjoyed. (Chapman, 1992: 1)

But rock and roll ‘was deemed to be inappropriate to the public service pursuit of the great and the good’ (Chapman, 1992: 2)

Audiences responded to this control by defecting to illegal pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline, which were ‘taking on the stuffy establishment and giving audiences alternative radio formats’ (Fleming, 2009: 35). By 1968 21 pirate radio stations were broadcasting, ‘with an estimated total daily audience of between 10–15 million’ (Fleming, 2009: 35), presenting ‘a top 40 music format with casual, chatty links from DJs so that in both style and content it was the antithesis of BBC broadcasting at the time’ (Fleming, 2009: 36). ‘Entertainment’ radio, offering the pop songs that listeners wanted, was not legally available. But this did not stop consumers, who sought out illegal alternatives.

Conclusion

The question of the relationship between media and power continues to exercise researchers. In this commentary I have suggested that it might prove useful to consider the differences both between different systems for producing culture and between different kinds of power. Lawrence Levine has demonstrated that art and entertainment emerged as distinct cultural categories in western countries over the course of the 19th century. Mark Gibson has argued that it is useful to move away from a monolithic idea of ‘power’ as ‘a single, objective social phenomenon’ (2007: 73). With these perspectives in place we can then trace a number of different powers in the production of culture, and look specifically at how their distribution differs in the models of art and entertainment. Consumers in liberal democracies ultimately retain control over their bodies – to watch or not to watch a text, to leave a room and stay, stand and cheer or sit in silence. This is not an unimportant power – it leads us to think about the contribution that consumers may make to the process of production. Entertainment wants audiences to contribute to the making of texts: at live events this happens directly, while in mediated events forms of data gathering include focus groups and the tracking of ticket sales. By contrast, artists pride themselves on not involving the audience in production. As to the question of who controls the range of what forms of culture are available – historically it would seem that while large organisations can control what is legally available, if they do not offer material that interests consumers, those consumers will take up other options – for example illegally obtained forms of mediated culture.