Shock Value

PROTO MAGAZINE:
the magazine of Massachusetts General Hospital
Spring 2009

Shock Value
by James Panero

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In 1926, Otto Neurath, the Austrian philosopher of science, christened the 1900s the “century of the eye”: “Wall posters call out to us from the streets and hallways; exhibitions are inviting us; millions of people are watching the motion picture screens every evening....”

For the health sciences, this development became a lifesaver. In a time before preventive medicine, the containment of infectious diseases depended on widespread awareness. To broadcast prevention strategies, public health agencies developed (in a modern phrase) multimedia campaigns consisting of radio advertising, pamphleteering and posters.

“Media technology was as much of a magic bullet as vaccines were,” argues Michael Sappol, the curator of “An Iconography of Contagion: An Exhibition of 20th-Century Health Posters From the Collection of the National Library of Medicine.” The show will travel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this September. With 22 posters from the United States and abroad, the show breaks ground by examining the art as well as the science of health campaigns, which employed modernist style to great effect.

“La course à la mort,” by Charles Emmanuel Jodelet, the oldest work in the show, calls to mind nineteenth-century caricature. Death, personified as a hooded skeleton, watches a race between tuberculosis, syphilis and cancer. As is typical of the time, text, rather than image, communicates the essential information; in this case, the annual death rates in France from the three diseases. The lesson is that the two contagious diseases lead the pack—and the public should avoid them.

Following perhaps a decade later, “Atisch” (Achoo) sounds a clear call to action in a more abstract way. Inspired by the flatness and the economy of line seen in Art Nouveau and Art Deco, Danish cartoonist Storm P shows a man sneezing on a disapproving crowd. The figure and the caption—“Thus begins an epidemic”—are easily grasped from a distance.

Another decade, another style: “She may be.. a bag of TROUBLE” recalls the style of pulp novels and pinups. “Posters about VD were meant to incite anxiety and also give pleasure,” says Sappol. This one, targeted at GIs in Europe, was intended to reduce the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea.

The exhibit’s most innovative image, “No home remedy or quack doctor ever cured syphilis or gonorrhea,” by Leonard Karsakov, takes its cue from Russian constructivist art, merging images and text, and Dada collage to form a patient made up of newspaper

After the Second World War, as health services focused more on preventive science than public awareness, came a downturn. Then the rise of a plague no science could prevent—AIDS—led to a rebirth. “Discover safer sex” uses the image of a sexually ambiguous couple to shock and intrigue. Nuance and artistry may have been lost, but 100 years on, the arts continue to play a role in the fight against infectious illness.

Evolution for Art's Sake

CITY JOURNAL
"Evolution for Art’s Sake"
Denis Dutton’s Darwinian aesthetics
by James Panero

a review of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton (Bloomsbury, 288 pp., $25)

This year marks the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. An international Darwin Day is set for February 12, the biologist’s birthday. But the annus mirabilis is off to an early start with the publication of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, a Darwinian attempt to explain humanity’s interest in art. Dutton may not be a household name, but his Web portal Arts & Letters Daily has become an international phenomenon, a virtual Galapagos of cultural interest, since he formed it out of an e-mail newsletter in 1998. A professor in the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, Dutton has now written a book full of observations that again demonstrate his uncanny ability to collect complex arguments and present them as thought-provoking statements.

Dutton builds a bold cross-cultural argument: we all have a prehistoric “art instinct” programmed into our genes through natural and sexual selection. The Art Instinct begins with the results of a recent survey of international artistic taste, which concluded that “people in very different cultures around the world gravitate toward the same general type of pictorial representation: a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals”—images that we often find in the kitschy world of calendar art. How to explain such universal taste? “The calendar industry has not conspired to influence taste,” Dutton writes, “but rather caters to preexisting, precalendrical human preferences.”

Dutton’s belief in a universal urge for art finds common ground with older aesthetic theories, from the metaphysics of Immanuel Kant to the spiritualism of Emanuel Swedenborg to the Kunstwollen of Alois Riegl. But the idea of universality in the arts has been under attack ever since Continental critical theory took over the academy and went after connoisseurship as a social construction. “The whole idea that art worlds are monadically sealed off from one another is daft,” Dutton counters. “Do we need to be reminded that Chopin is loved in Korea, that Spaniards collect Japanese prints, or that Cervantes is read in Chicago and Shakespeare enjoyed in China? . . . Darwinian aesthetics can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values.”

Dutton devotes quite a bit of space to setting up his premise, arguing exhaustively with theorists like Arthur C. Danto about the definition of art. Dutton’s philosophical ground-setting may be academically responsible, but Chapters Three and Four (“What is Art?” and “‘But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art’”) are uphill work—directed, it seems, more at a university audience than at the general reader.

Once Dutton arrives at his central thesis, The Art Instinct becomes an altogether better read. The Pleistocene age lasted for 80,000 generations of humans and protohumans, Dutton writes, “against a mere five hundred generations since the first cities.” For the human race, the survival of the fittest—a term coined by the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, not by Darwin himself—played out in these long years. The people of the Pleistocene most likely found time for leisure, Dutton argues, and in the arts they developed the adaptive traits that aided in socialization and sexual selection. “It is inconceivable that Pleistocene people did not have a vivid intellectual and creative life,” he writes. “This life would have found expression in song, dance, and imaginative speech—skills that matched in complexity and sophistication what we know of Pleistocene jewelry, painting, and carving.” Through the arts, early man learned to see the world. “This intense interest in art as emotional expression derives from wanting to see through art into another human personality: it springs from a desire for knowledge of another person. . . . Talking about art is an indirect way of talking about the inner lives of other people.”

Here Dutton cites Darwin’s most controversial book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and its portrayal of “the mind as a sexual ornament.” Think of the arts as something akin to the peacock’s tail, Dutton writes. The peacock’s wasteful piece of plumage is useless—in fact, a hindrance—when it comes to foraging for food or escaping from predators. Nevertheless, its tail is attractive to peahens precisely because it is an opulent display of extra resources, one that says this peacock is doing better than just scraping by in the world of peafowl. For early man, a social animal, survival likewise not only favored the strongest, but also “the cleverest, wittiest, and wisest.” Just as “the evolutionary function of language is not only to be a means of efficient communication but to be a signal of fitness and general intelligence,” Dutton writes, “sexual selection was building a more interesting human personality, one that we have come to know as convivial, imaginative, gossipy, and gregarious, with a taste for the dramatic.” The art instinct is closely connected with this sexual selection. Simply put, the arts have sex appeal, and it should come as little surprise, Dutton writes, that “love is poetry’s natural subject.”

There are, of course, plenty of counterarguments against Dutton’s “art instinct.” The most obvious is that artists in recorded history often seem to have little interest in procreation, whether because of homosexuality, social dysfunction, or simple lack of interest. Cyril Connolly was on to something when he tartly wrote that “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.” Art-making often seems to be a distraction from, or even a stand-in for, sexual reproduction.

Another concern is that art history is already besotted with theory. About the only place one finds Marx or Freud read with any sense of relevance nowadays is in the study of the humanities, with art history being no exception. (By contrast, try finding Freud discussed in a psychology class with anything but historical interest.) Does Dutton expect us to add Darwinism to the dysfunctional set of Marxist and Freudian master keys? Fortunately, it appears not: “No philosophy of art can succeed if it ignores either art’s natural sources or its cultural character,” he writes, hoping to expand our range of inquiry rather than limit it.

Darwinism is, nevertheless, still a theory of its own, no more so than in the study of Dutton’s “art instinct.” Dutton builds his case on speculation. He constructs a story line that must be reverse-engineered back from the present day. He devotes little attention to what early artistic evidence we do have, such as the cave paintings of Lascaux. Likewise, Dutton could have compared the art of early recorded civilizations: they should exhibit similar artistic practices, according to Dutton’s thesis, even if they developed at opposite ends of the globe.

Still Dutton’s central premise is worth repeating. “What sexual selection in evolution does,” he writes, “is give us an explanation of why so much human energy has been exhausted on objects of the most extreme elegance and complexity—not just the massive symmetry of the Pyramids, but the poignancy of Shakespeare’s sonnets or the Schubert Quintet in C.” It’s a remarkable idea and one that deserves exploration through the historical evidence, both what we have on hand and what remains to be uncovered. The Art Instinct is an important first step in that process—a hyperlink to future conversations.

Brought to You by the Letter S

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
December 28, 2008

Brought to you by the Letter S
By JAMES PANERO

a review of
STREET GANG: The Complete History of “Sesame Street.”
By Michael Davis (Viking. $27.95)

In 1981, when I was 6, about 10 million American children daily tuned in to the PBS show “Sesame Street.” That same year, one of the writers for “Sesame Street,” my real-life neighbor, asked if I’d like to appear on the show. It was my golden ticket, but crossing over to the other side of the television screen can be a demystifying journey. The “Sesame Street” soundstage looked like a facsimile of the televised world — small and (surprisingly) indoors. The Muppets were controlled by operators; we were told not to look down at them. And there was Big Bird, stored in the middle of the set on a massive hook. When I reached out to pet him, a voice came from the sky: “Don’t touch those feathers!” admonished one of Big Bird’s creators, the remarkably named Kermit Love.

The address of 123 Sesame Street was never quite the same. Yet to be cast out of the garden of television-land can be a learning experience. “Street Gang: The Complete History of ‘Sesame Street,’ ” by Michael Davis, a former columnist for TV Guide, now offers the behind-the-lens story, the first comprehensive account, of this 39-year-old show.

The book details the awesome lengths that “Sesame Street,” undoubtedly the most workshopped and vetted program in the history of children’s television, went through to captivate its young audience. The show’s music and quick cuts concealed its educational ambitions. “Commercial breaks” advertised numbers and the alphabet through Jim Henson’s Muppet pitchmen: the Count, Grover and Cookie Monster. Kermit the Frog, wearing a trench coat, told fairy tales through news flashes from Rapunzel’s tower. Meanwhile, the urban street scenes at the center of the show communicated the social values of a progressive culture. Here was TV at its most sublime, but also an entrancing product of a liberal age, something Mom was happy for us to watch.

The “Sesame Street” story begins on a Sunday in December 1965. At 6:30 in the morning, 3-year-old Sarah Morrisett tuned in to the test patterns while awaiting her cartoons to begin a half-hour later. Her father, Lloyd Morrisett, an experimental psychologist and a vice president of the Carnegie Corporation, took note. “It struck me there was something fascinating to Sarah about television,” he says.

“Sarah Morrisett had memorized an entire repertoire of TV jingles,” Davis writes. “It is not too far a stretch to say that Sarah’s mastery of jingles led to a central hypothesis of the great experiment that we know as ‘Sesame Street’: if television could successfully teach the words and music to advertisements, couldn’t it teach children more substantive material by co-opting the very elements that made ads so effective?”

The thought of using the trappings of television for progressive ends seemed anathema to most intellectuals, who were wholly skeptical of this mass-culture medium, but Morrisett brought up his observation at dinner with Joan Ganz Cooney, the future creator of “Sesame Street.”

In the mid-1960s, as one of his grand social initiatives, Lyndon B. Johnson took up the cause of National Educational Television (later known as the Public Broadcasting Service), a lackluster confederation of chalk-dusted channels. Like the show she developed for PBS that would define the network, Cooney was steeped in the ideals of Johnson’s Great Society. In New York, while working in publicity for commercial television, she was introduced to William Phillips, co-founder of Partisan Review, the small but vastly influential journal of highbrow leftist opinion. In her spare time, Cooney did publicity for Partisan Review and produced a fund-raiser at Columbia that was attended by Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy and Lionel Trilling.

Cooney’s ability to transcend the divisions between high and low culture defined her success at “Sesame Street,” which brought Madison Avenue advertisers and game show creators together with New York intellectuals and the education department of Harvard. Lloyd Morrisett, through his connections at the Carnegie Foundation, helped Cooney line up the millions in grants to cover the research, writing and production needed to create a show that could compete with the commercial networks. McGeorge Bundy, one of “the best and the brightest” in the Kennedy administration and by then president of the Ford Foundation, sharpened the show’s political edge by homing in on the children of the urban underclass. “Sesame Street” would be the television equivalent of Head Start, the federal child-welfare program founded by Johnson in the belief, Davis writes, that “the tyranny of America’s poverty cycle could be broken if the emotional, social, health, nutritional and psychological needs of poor children could be met.”

In its high ideals and comprehensive approach, “ ‘Sesame Street’ came along and rewrote the book,” Davis says. “Never before had anyone assembled an A-list of advisers to develop a series with stated educational norms and objectives. Never before had anyone viewed a children’s show as a living laboratory, where results would be vigorously and continually tested. Never before in television had anyone thought to commingle writers and social science researchers.”

“Sesame Street” turned the entertainment of children’s television into a science, as the program was extensively tested with nursery school audiences through a “distracter” machine that gauged children’s eye focus second by second during the run of each show. It is no coincidence that the program proved to be so popular. When early studies determined that its street scenes were faltering, Jim Henson brought about a final breakthrough. At the time, his Muppets were relegated to the “commercial” segments as cut-aways from the street-based story line. For this, Henson drew on his own experience. He had originally developed Kermit and the Muppets for commercial work; his 1950s show “Sam and Friends,” with its zany ads for Wilkins coffee, has now found a second life on YouTube. Over the objections of researchers, who had advised against mixing the fantasy of the Muppets with the reality of the street, Henson developed Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch to be central characters on the main stage, both driving and subverting the program’s self-seriousness.

Davis tracks down every “Sesame” anec dote and every “Sesame” personality in his book, and the result is more an oral history than a tightly organized narrative. The development of the show’s characters, as well as the performers’ own lives, can be illuminating. Bob McGrath, who has played Bob from the start, once enjoyed a pop singing career in Japan. Gordon, the neighborhood’s black role model, played by Matt Robinson and then Roscoe Orman, was named for the photographer Gordon Parks. The character Susan, Gordon’s stay-at-home wife, was once denounced by feminists. Emilio Delgado and Sonia Manzano joined the cast in the ’70s as Luis and Maria after protests against the show’s lack of Hispanic characters. Will Lee, who played the store owner Mr. Hooper, came through the Yiddish theater and the radical Group Thea ter, and was blacklisted in the ’50s; Lee’s death in 1982 became a defining moment when “Sesame Street” chose to address the news directly on the air. Northern Calloway, who played Mr. Hooper’s young assistant, David, proved to be an even more tragic case: by the time I appeared on camera with him, according to Davis, Calloway was medicated with lithium after a violent psychotic breakdown; a manic-depressive in and out of treatment, he remained on the show through the late ’80s, but died in 1990 after suffering a seizure in a psychiatric hospital.

Davis lingers on such gossip. I could do without dwelling on the drinking habits of Captain Kangaroo (Bob Keeshan, forever jealous of the acclaim for “Sesame Street”) or several of the book’s other trivial details. Do we really need to know that Cooney served boeuf bourguignon, “a traditional French country recipe . . . on Page 315 of the first volume of ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking,’ ” to Lloyd Morrisett at their 1966 dinner?

Far more interesting are the failings and criticisms of the lavishly praised show. Terrence O’Flaherty, a television critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, accused “Sesame Street” of being “deeply larded with ungrammatical Madison Avenue jargon.” Carl Bereiter, a preschool authority, said, “It’s based entirely on audience appeal and is not really teaching anything in particular.” And Neil Postman complained that it relieved parents “of their responsibility to teach their children to read.”

The real challenge to the show came in the 1990s, around the time Joan Cooney retired as chairwoman of the Children’s Television Workshop, the program’s nonprofit governing body. Once revolutionary, “Sesame Street” came to be seen as a dated reminder of urban decay, while the purple dinosaur Barney took children’s television out to the clean suburban schoolyard. “None of Barney’s friends lives in a garbage can, and none grunts hip-hop,” National Review cheered. In response, “Sesame Street” made an ill-fated attempt at urban renewal, developing an extension to the set called “Around the Corner” that seemed “less like Harlem and more like any gentrified up-and-coming neighborhood in America,” Davis writes. Professional child actors were regularly employed for the first time.

The broken-window theory may have worked to clean up New York, but not so for “Sesame Street” — as its empire expanded abroad, ratings eroded at home, and the gentrified set was abandoned. “Sesame Street” ceased to be a reflection of its surroundings. Early on, the writer-producer Jon Stone rejected the traditional trappings of children’s television: “Sesame Street” would have “no Treasure House, no toy maker’s workshop, no enchanted castle, no dude ranch, no circus,” Davis says. But this is what “Sesame Street” had become, and perhaps what it really always was: an urban fantasy world born of ’60s idealism. Davis has written a tireless if not altogether artful history of this unique place. Here, finally, we get to touch Big Bird’s feathers.