Is a totally commercial culture still culture?

I haven’t even watched much of this cool Frontline episode on marketing, and already my poor brain is redlined.

Someone says this: Once a culture becomes totally friendly to advertising, it ceases to be a culture.

I think about it. Yes, I decide, it makes sense. Culture is what the people do in response to the stimulus of living their lives. The commercial version is what people with money do to try and get more money out of the public. Completely different causes, completely different effects.

I tell this to my husband. Telling a good idea to your spouse is bar none the fastest way to blow it full of holes. ;)

He says, not so. Commercial culture is a new kind of culture, and, normative judgements about whether it’s better or worse than the old kind aside, it’s still a type of culture. Just like algebra and geometry are different types of math, he says.

I fume for a minute. If commercial culture is not culture, then where is our culture going as it’s replaced by mass consumerism? Is it disappearing? Can a society have no culture? Or is “real culture” simply going underground, ceasing to be a dominant paradigm, maybe eventually to return?

There’s the unignorable fact that commercial culture doesn’t feel like culture. I think this is a function of motive — the How is more important than the What, as the Zen folk say. I get the sense that a lot of people think that that’s incidental; that the creative force doesn’t leave its mark upon the created thing. I have trouble accepting that.

I’ve always believed that on a fundamental level, the motive of the doer imprints itself into the act — maybe not in a black & white, 1:1 way, but undeniably nonetheless. I consider it a safe generalization to say that a piece of music written to advertise something is not the same category of thing as a piece of artistic music. The different intent, even applied to the same instruments, creates a different class of product. It’s not different like jazz and rock are different. It’s more like the difference between a mini-van and a Stealth bomber. Same materials, but created with very disparate things “in mind” — literally. Perhaps part of their difference is that artistic endeavors (among other things) inform and compose culture, and commercial endeavors do not?

Or maybe that’s just me overreacting to the ickiness of commercial “culture”, and maybe our society just has an icky culture.  >.<

My husband would disagree with me, of course. Guess which one of us likes Andy Warhol. ;)