The city-slicker mentality

As the centre of immigration to the United States, New York was the crucible of American culture in the 20th century. But does the Big Apple now care more about money than art?

"New York, New York, capital of literature, the arts, social pretension. The capital of all music. The capital of exhausted trees."(E L Doctorow, The City of God)

Sometimes, oh, maybe more frequently than that, New Yorkers overreach themselves in their assumption that what happens in their city is all that matters in cultural America. But when it comes to summarising American culture in the year 2000, framing the conversation in terms of New York is very useful. It may not be The City of God, as E L Doctorow claims in his newly published novel, but it is the city where the nation's media are headquartered, where the terms of America's cultural discussion are defined. And the aesthetic discussion that obsesses these cultural opinion- formers and their audience today is not about the arts themselves, but about the money that makes, markets and purchases the arts.

"The Business of America is Business," Henry Ford said during America's first Gilded Age. "The Culture of America is Business," is how Ford's dictum might be paraphrased in the middle of its second Gilded Age. In the post-industrial era, arts and entertainment products, intellectual property and cultural "stuff" are among the nation's biggest exporting industries. The Motion Picture Association of America, the film industry's lobbying group, claims that movies and television programmes are the second largest source of export income in the US economy, after aerospace products.

Cultural products are so important to America's trade balance that preserving their dominance in the global economy very nearly stymied the creation of the World Trade Organisation. Back in 1994, with less than 24 hours to go before the deadline for creating the WTO out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, American and European negotiators were at each other's throats over US demands that the EU stop "protecting" its television markets. The Americans were demanding that the EU rescind its directive requiring that 51 per cent of television programmes in any EU member state be made in Europe. The Americans further demanded that France stop putting a special tax on tickets sold to foreign films in order to subsidise the French film industry. Not surprisingly, the French were unimpressed. With time running out, and a solution not likely to be found, the cultural products issue looked like a deal-buster. In the end, it was put aside and left out of the WTO agreement altogether.

Since then, the growth of the internet has given even greater economic importance to Hollywood's "cultural stuff". The global economy touches more than a popular art form such as cinema. Sotheby's and Christie's are multi- billion-dollar global businesses; the great publishing houses are all conglomerated inside multinational companies, and editors cannot make a decision to publish a book without the approval of their marketing people.

Cultural criticism is as likely to be about the process of marketing art work as about the work itself. John Seabrook's book-length essay Nobrow, published earlier this year by the venerable house of Alfred Knopf, is a perfect example. In it, Seabrook, a writer for the New Yorker, describes how marketing has become the essence of culture. His starting point is the breakdown of distinctions between what used to be called highbrow and lowbrow culture. That is not really news, but Seabrook is young enough to have missed the Sixties - and most of the Seventies as well. Once he has reduced all American artistic expression to pop, or "nobrow", culture, it's a simple step to emphasising the importance of creating "buzz" around any person or group's work in any medium. How else can you make people aware of the work's existence? In the "culture is a business" world-view, there's no intrinsic artistic value in any work, be it movie, symphony, sculpture or literature. There's no reference to the social, historical or class factors that shape a work. The only thing that has value or is worth analysing about a work of art is the amount of publicity attached to it. Thus, marketing is the essential component of contemporary cultural exchange. Or so Seabrook claims.

Even traditional New York intellectuals who discuss art as a form of human expression with intrinsic worth, not market value, speak in terms of globalisation. The philosopher and art critic Arthur C Danto asserts that, today, "there is nothing anybody could think of as distinctly American art. The speed with which ideas are transmitted means that there is little difference between the work you see in New York, Berlin, Milan or London."

It was not always thus. Danto says that, if you had asked him to define American art in 1950, his answer would have been clear: the New York School - Abstract Expressionism - whose form, style and substance were absolutely unique to the US.

The year 1950 is an interesting choice for Danto to make - beyond its numerical symmetry. In 1950, the great postwar eruption of culture was just beginning in America. It was focused almost entirely in New York and it was not about money. It was about the work. The eruption occurred not because America had won the war, but rather because the war provided children of immigrants the opportunity to assimilate into the mainstream of society. Economic booms come and go, but the deep source of American culture remains the same: the immigrant identity crisis. How much of your old culture can you retain and still assimilate into the mainstream of American society? How far will American society let you assimilate? These are not questions consciously asked by new arrivals; they simply summarise the burden of all immigrants. Being an immigrant is a desperate act of hope.

It is the children who begin the process of answering the questions. The second generation is encouraged to assimilate more deeply into the American mainstream, to attend university if possible. Sometime in this second generation, though occasionally in the first, the process of assimilation is questioned. Nostalgia for the family's place of origin, the whispered words of the old country's language, musical in their sound but their meanings unknown, begin to work on the second generation immigrant's mind. The realisation that you are American but not of the WASP society that still defines Americanness begins to make you question your identity. And from this questioning, so much of modern American culture has been shaped. (I wouldn't exclude African-Americans from this model. The great migration northward from the Jim Crow south in the 1920s and 1930s produced a similar identity crisis for blacks.)

When the Second World War broke out, the children and grandchildren of the immigrants who had arrived in their millions at Ellis Island at the turn of the century were at the peak of the questioning process. For three decades after the war, those who worked their answer out through artistic expression produced the great American works of the 20th century: Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Mark Rothko, Jerome Robbins, Robert Zimmerman, Woody Allen, Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Leonard Bernstein, Don De Lillo, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison. Not all of those people come from New York, but all of them established their reputations while living in the city. So you can understand why New Yorkers occasionally assume that their city's culture is the only American culture.

But the New York moment is passing quickly. Doctorow is over 70, and there is a valedictory feel to his City of God, as if the author is saying farewell to the once true, now idealised sense of New York as the place where a thousand years of Jewish persecution were redeemed in the space of two generations.

There is a valedictory feel to the laudatory reviews for the 67-year-old Susan Sontag's new novel, In America, a book that has its moments but is really not that good. It's as if the reviewers want to praise the historical moment that created an intellect such as Sontag's, rather than the novel in question.

There is a valedictory feel to the New York Times profile of Stephen Sondheim on his 70th birthday, in which Sondheim says: "The theatre I wrote for is dead."

The New York moment may be passing, but the immigrant dynamic remains at work. Like an underground spring replenishing a river, new immigrants refresh American culture. Today, the new immigrants are Hispanic. In the last decades of the 20th century, millions of people from Hispanic America and the Hispanic Caribbean emigrated to the US, the largest migration since the great "flood" from Russia, central Europe and Italy a hundred years ago. Thirty-one million people in the US are of Hispanic origin, and most arrived in the past 30 years.

Although they travelled a shorter distance to get to the US, and live in a time when they can fly to their birthplace for the weekend, Hispanic immigrants still face the same questions of assimilation and identity as the European immigrants of a century ago. In working out their answers, Hispanics and Latinos are already influencing the mainstream of American cultural expression. Beyond the money frenzy that obsesses civilised New York, that is the real story of American culture in the year 2000.

The American language is changing, as elements of Spanish are finding their way into everyday English usage. The novelist Cormac McCarthy was criticised for the frequent use of Spanish in his Border Trilogy. But spend 24 hours in McCarthy's home town of El Paso, and you quickly understand that he is accurately recording the way people speak along the US-Mexico border. Anglos and Hispanics drift in and out of one another's language, words migrating to new meanings in their conversation.

In New York, away from the din of money culture, in the few streets left in lower Manhattan that haven't been gentrified, Puerto Rican bards have reclaimed poetry for the street. The Nuyorican poetry slam is as lively a cultural event as any concert by the latest band being hyped to extinction by a multinational culture corporation.

The very best of the Puerto Rican poets, Martin Espada, has been working out the question of identity for most of his life, first as a poverty lawyer, representing his fellow Latinos in fights with slumlords, then as the author of six volumes of poetry. In his collection Imagine the Angels of Bread, Espada has written a poetic benediction for all the generations of immigrants that have come and will continue to come to the US.

Perhaps someday this verse will adorn the monument that will inevitably be built, not in New York, but along the border looking back into Mexico, to the millions of Hispanic immigrants who came to America with nothing but their dreams:

So may every humiliated mouth
teeth like desecrated headstones
fill with the angels of bread.

Michael Goldfarb's series America in Perspective is currently airing on BBC World Service until the end of May

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