Week Four: New York City and the Arts in the ’60s

What I hoped to convey to you in class last Monday were a number of ideas that are worth rehashing. First among them was the review of what was discussed and presented in the previous class on New York (“Not so Good, Bad, and Ugly” which I mistakenly associated with early Spaghetti Westerner Dino De Laurentiis, but as I was reminded by a more astute class member was the title of a 1966 movie by Sergio Leone). I have recently added some more woes of the period such as the vile NYC Smog. The purpose of all this was to set the stage for the biographies of people who lived in the Big Apple during that decade. One new thing I mentioned in class on Monday was the connection of historical events such as the Cold War to the fears of Nuclear War, that continued through the 1960s teaching children to “Duck and Cover” in their classrooms after watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKqXu-5jw60 The vision of a super-crowded world was dumped on the reading public by Paul and Anne Erlich’s Population Bomb (1968); not to mention the end of the world environmental scenarios like Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring (1958). Remind me when we consider 1960s television on March 13 to show the famous anti-Goldwater for President political advertisement.
As to creating an atmosphere of dread more close to home was relating the tripling of the number of murders in the decade of the Sixties to why the public would believe the erroneously shaming Kitty Genovese story. While most racially-oriented people associated the rise in crime with the rapid migration of African Americans and Latinos, especially Puerto Ricans, few connected to the deluge of drugs that began pouring into the city and the widespread corruption, the 1960s Mob Wars, and even collusion of the NYCPD as reported by the Knapp Commission. Interesting as well to note here the (French) connection of drugs to NYC’s art scene. Given all this bad news the 1966 NYC Transit and Newspaper Strikes 1962-63 barely deserve mention except for those who like to read and use public transportation.
The decline of NYC however did have an aluminum if not a silver lining by providing the opportunity for the influx of artists without means who settled in what were then increasing low-rent districts like East and West Greenwich Village. Caroline Ware and Jane Jacobs chronicled the early and 1960s story of The Village as a home for many creative and less “Creative Classes.” Much of our understanding of art in any period can be framed by the idea of Pierre Bourdieu as to the “Tastes” of Luxury and Necessity which parallel our common assumptions about “High and Low” Culture and Brows. Remember however that class is not the only arbiter of taste; ethnicity also makes a big, sometimes the key difference. For example, we have paid most of our attention to “Popular” music and its 1960s genres like Doo Wop, Rock n Roll, Folk etc… but when I asked my 1960s friends what they listed to many spoke of ethnic variations such as Italian and Italian American singers and music which on occasion became a crossover hit as did Caribbean and Latino music at times. Here’s part of a FB exchange with an Italian American friend:
This sounds like a great course, Jerry. I’d start with Dion and the Belmonts and follow that line through the Four Seasons and The Rascals; Bobby Darin and Connie Francis; Bobby Rydell and Frankie Avalon, alas (you can find clips of American Bandstand with the whole Philly crowd); and then of course Sinatra ( I like the 1964 sessions with Basie and the late 1968 duets with Jobim), Tony Bennett, VIc Damone. See if they can hear and make sense of the different styles. For me (like Bob below) the key voices of that time are Felix Cavialere (Eddie Brigati too, especially ‘I Ain’t Gonne Eat Out My Heart Anymore” and “How Can I Be Sure?”) and Frankie Valli.

Like other arts, humor in the form of jokes also is not universally appreciation. Most of you did not appreciate my “elephant jokes” and I had no idea what was meant by the Kermit Meme gag. Mort Sahl’s political humor and Professor Irwin Corey seemed to be more accessible. I chose them because they both made fun of us professors. I will provide some other links in the Resources Page such as Mike Nichols and Elaine May who were expert at improvisation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKL1tNv__kU In class we also discussed the relationship between the work of Diane Arbus’s beautifully grotesque 1960 NYC portraits and Susan Sontag’s essay on Photography. This morning I asked everyone who came into he coffee shop I haunt who was the most important artist of the 1960s and everyone said Andy Warhol. It would be interesting to understand why. How does art and artists reflect a period or how does the period reflect them? Did the ideas of the 1950s better inform the 60s? One of the most influential books, David Reisman, Nathan Glazer, and Ruel Denney’s The Lonely Crowd was published in 1950 and categorized American as “Inner and Other Directed”: As Riesman wrote, “The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed, not necessarily to control others but to relate to them.” National leaders in the 1950s complained that too many Americans were conformists, citing the “victory” of the USSR in the space race. In the 1960s they complained that there were too many nonconformists. Perhaps both were other-directed… or not. After all how powerful are “ideas?”