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Hutchinson’s ambitions extend beyond the 1940s to larger questions about American culture. Critics and philosophers who interpret American culture in a vocabulary learned from European culture mislead themselves and their professional disciples. In the 1940s Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote still-influential essays about the debased American popular-culture industry, but as Hutchinson observes, they had assumed—naively and provincially—that the American class system matched the Central European class system, that American mass culture, like European kitsch, had been imposed on the lumpen masses by their economic overlords. In reality, American mass culture arose from different classes producing, out of their own varied sources, cultures of their own, most famously in the rise of jazz, which Adorno loathed. At the same time, American popular arts absorbed visual and verbal techniques from the most rarefied avant-garde in ways that had few European parallels.
The Batman comic books, Hutchinson reports, adopted the styles of expressionist film and modernist typography. (This was not a new development: the Krazy Kat comic strip showed comparable influences twenty years earlier.) Popular culture became receptive to self-conscious modernism in ways unique to the decade. Gertrude Stein, “no longer a joke in the newspapers and popular magazines,” had become “a respected cultural icon,” commissioned by Life magazine in 1945 to travel with American troops while gathering material for a long photo essay on postwar Germany. Hutchinson reproduces the magazine’s photo of Stein posing with a half-dozen soldiers at the wreck of Hitler’s bunker.
full: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/03/07/george-hutchinson-abyss-reading-age-catastrophe/
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