Permanent adolescence: The triumph of mass art

Areplica of the young Bob Dylan walks along the platform ahead of me, as I get off the afternoon Tube at Bethnal Green. He's got the right shades, right curls, right tight trousers. Clinging to his arm is a loving Mod girl, also in replica. Long blonde hair cut straight across, short coat, white tights. He has perfected the saunter; she has the correct upward glance of adoration. Snapped close up, you'd swear it was 1965.

But then glance across the rail tracks. A huge Marks & Spencer poster for jumpers and skirts. Twiggy, looking something like her age. She leans against a vintage Mini which is painted with streams of flowers against a background of pink. No: it's 2006, after all. A 2006 trapped between hopes of the past and nostalgia for the future.

Nobody lives in the present, except painters, scientists and engineers. All these try to see the world as it is, if only (in the case of engineers) to re-make it now. Everyone else lives in a mishmash of future and past. The present is simply where hope and experience meet. A mixture of pain and dreams.

Mass culture, mass arts, popular art - grab your own label - has become the main wrap-around purveyor of such imagery. There may be a surface show of "reality," as in Jack Vetriano's pictures, based partly on teach-yourself-to-paint manuals, or in Ron Mueck's sculptures, based partly on his experience as a TV set designer. But the point is still to convey a dream or a nostalgia. Or both.

This rule is seldom violated, and only in special political and social circumstances. One exception was the heyday of photo-reportage in certain mid-20th century magazines, such as Picture Post. Since then, though, photography has gone all ironic and self-referential. Let's just say camp. The glamour photography of Mario Testino, forever yearning back to the studio stills of Samuel Goldwyn's MGM and Harry Cohn's Paramount, gave the National Portrait Gallery a sell-out show.

We're all dreaming together. The mass media have the quality of permanent adolescence, teetering between childhood's past and adulthood's future. As Big Brother cranks up again, think of television's previous "celebrity" creations: Jade Goody, Chantelle. Away from the small screen, adolescence may be dying out as a social fact: there's an ever more direct transit from the infant to the adult state. But adolescence lives on as the frame of mind of the mass media. They deliver a youth that many people never really attain.

What are the attributes of mass culture? Richard Hamilton, the English artist who more or less invented Pop Art, listed them like this: Popular (designed for mass audience), Witty, Transient (short-term solution), Sexy, Expendable, Gimmicky, Low cost, Glamorous, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Big business.

And Hamilton's list still stands up. Most people who complain about the mass arts attack them for doing what they were always intended to do. The technologies they're most associated with are: cheap printing; photography (stills, movies, TV); studio-processed music; plastics; the web. As components of the mass arts, plastics are what the 19th century cast iron of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace was only aspiring to. They're the most adaptable materials ever invented.

In every lads' mag, PVC-clad glamour models caper lasciviously among cheap polypropylene sets. And not just in lads' mags. In the Guardian last month, one young woman was photographed by David LaChapelle, trapped beneath a huge blow-up acrylic hamburger. Another was threatened with rape by a polystyrene dinosaur. A surprising place to find all this? Not so. The line between mass and high culture, art and pornography, crumbles all the time.

Top among the dreams the media purvey is the wet dream. On the internet the most-visited web-sites are pornographic. Genealogy is second. (Dizzy visions of past glories and future pleasures.) One LaChapelle photo showed Paris Hilton, half-naked, giving the camera the finger. For her recent polemic Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy talked to teenage girls raised, she said, on thongs and Paris Hilton. She argued that we're seeing the "pornoisation" of culture. Certainly the porn trade is doing better than the car business. It was ahead of Volvo and Toyota in organising its production teams in groups. Pornography confirms that mass art, like French classical drama largely proceeds by stereotypes. It trades at the outermost edge of what's acceptable. Of course, there are still taboos. There always are. In Britain it's now all right to be overtly obscene, but not to be overtly racist. Previously, the reverse was true.

Individual items of mass culture are transient, but the delivery systems have a long half-life. The News of the World will never again sell eight and a half million, as it did in the 1950s (more than twice today's figure). Yet it's not about to expire. Newspapers and magazines depend, more and more, on communicating gossip and those little paragraphs the French call faits divers.

One glossary defines them as "unimportant news items." These, though, are what you read with fascination if you find an old newspaper in the lining of a cupboard: white witch accused of killing paganist partner, film star gets up to no good in hotel's massage suite during honeymoon, Church of England seeks "vicar of clubland" to visit Carlisle niteries. Private Eye is a fortnightly faits divers anthology.

It's not the sententious press editorials which endure, but the quirks of people's lives. The storylines of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Stendahl's Le Rouge et le Noir both had their origin in a fait divers. The internet magazines Popbitch and Holy Moly! flourish by purveying nothing but sheer gossip. Marshall McLuhan's global village has arrived: email and texting replace the long-gone natter over the garden fence.

To capture the fluidity of the mass arts, the best writers take one specific item or process and look at it in depth: George Orwell's essays, McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride (about the imagery of car ads), David Thomson or Pauline Kael on movies. The more specific the better: Angela Carter, for example, on the symbology of red lipstick; John Berger on the slippery ethics of war photography; Reyner Banham on the iconography of the potato crisp.

Attempts to build more elaborate structures of interpretation miss the point about mass art: its surface. Its secret depth is that it has no secret depth. It's important, always, not to read into the content, or apparent content, of mass culture a statement about the people who're using that product. Not all the people who watch Big Brother want to model themselves on Chantelle (though some do). Not all the readers of the Sun or OK share the values of what they're reading. The social historian EP Thompson once spoke of the "stubbornness of being." In other words, people are tougher than that. It's not media that use people, but people that use media.

About other arts, the non-knowledgeable have to clutch at some escape-phrase like "I don't know much about it, but..." Mass art is what everybody knows about. Anybody's opinion is as valid as anybody else's: the latest re-design (No. 6) of the Ford Transit van; the Eurovision song contest; Keira Knightley v. Kate Moss; Botox v. cosmetic surgery; cherry-flavour Coca-Cola; Scary Movie 4. This universality is very different from Shakespeare's or Tolstoy's. But it's what gives these arts their strength. It shouldn't be held against them.

A mass-cultural object is never a one-person production. Better call it a process than an object. Newspaper editors seldom write their own headlines. TV presenters almost never write their own scripts. Films are the classic case of cultural group-think, in spite of the craze for attributing everything to the director. Charles Higham, a leading Hollywood cameraman, reports in his memoirs how he worked on The Song of Bernadette. This was the story of the visions at Lourdes : director Henry King; Linda Darnell as Virgin Mary; four Oscars, 1943. Whenever St Bernadette (Jennifer Jones) was on screen, Higham put a spotlight glow behind her, "just like you would use to make a head stand away from the object behind it." He and the director then looked at some cut reels. King said: "Do you notice something?" Higham said, "What?" And King said, "Every time she appears there's something glowing at the back of her head." Higham wondered if King "thought this was something spiritual that had crept into the picture from heaven." But it was Higham's own little miracle.

Film has lost the all-embracing dominance of the days when Albert Camus, growing up in the settler world of French Algeria, noticed all the young men trying to look like Clark Gable and the young women copying Marlene Dietrich. In the 1970s, it even seemed as if cinema would die the death so often predicted for it. Then someone invented the multiplex and ticket sales edged up. Studios no longer make films for everyone, which was Sam Goldwyn's and Harry Cohn's ambition, and Charlie Chaplin's. They now target different audience-segments.

Yet cinema has seeped ineradicably into our consciousness. Why else should the Vatican expend energy attacking The Da Vinci Code film? When New York's twin towers fell, on 11 September 2002, onlookers said, "It was just like a movie." One commentator on United 93, Paul Greengrass's new 9/11 film, said: "We keep replaying that day in the movie-eye of our mind."

Every Hollywood film, whatever its overt subject, is always an advertisement for the American way of life. Born in the East London slums of Hoxton in 1930, the philosopher and broadcaster Bryan Magee remembered (in his 2003 autobiography Clouds of Glory) exactly when all British popular singers, influenced by the talkies, started to adopt American accents.

The internet has continued the US dominance. Mass culture, most of the time, is American culture. In the Victorian zenith of empire, Britain became the only country that didn't have to spell out its name on its postage stamps (and still doesn't). In our 21st century homage to political power and sheer inventiveness, the United States is the only country which doesn't need a national tag (uk, fr, it, ir) on its internet domains.

At its peak, cinema was more a part of the fashion trade than of the art business. But other mass media and other celebrities have picked up the baton. Among men, David Beckham, for example. Among women, Wayne Rooney's girl-friend Colleen McLoughlin, who has, we're told, "learnt the art of looking effortlessly stylish." Such names are only derided by those who're bemused by their power.

And fashion more and more plays games with the past (as witness my two Bethnal Green replicants). Though transient in intention, mass communication puts itself more and more on record. Nothing escapes from the eye of Google. The music, manners and modes of the past are instantly and synchronously to hand as never were before. Revivals of styles go with ever-gathering speed. The cycle, rubbish-camp-acceptable-antique (spelled out by the anthropologist Michael Thompson in his classic study, Rubbish Theory), has been drastically telescoped.

Mass communication is like the memories in a mind half-asleep. Or like your mind when drowning. The mass media are flatterers and foreshorteners. Everything is interwoven. The essential shape of mass communication is the newspaper serialisation of the book of the film of the TV show of the singer who wears those brilliant frocks and piercings. The mass arts have become a natural resource (like oil, water or diamonds). They offer images, and sometimes words, for you to take off the peg, and try on for size. They then become part of the cinema of the brain's internal fictions. An everlasting picture show. m

This article is adapted from Paul Barker's introduction to his new essay collection, Arts in Society (Five Leaves Publications, £9.99). Essayists include John Berger, Angela Carter and Reyner Banham.

To buy a copy call 08700 798 897 or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk