Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel's The Popular Arts (1964) argues that popular art passed through a transition in the 19th century that we can see in the English music hall tradition. Basically, the popular shifts between a communal practise, in which groups would dance together and sing together in traditional ways, to a singular practise, in which one performer's singing, dancing, storytelling, etc., stands in for that of the group. The individual performer represents, literally speaks for, a community. The book offers Chaplin as the first example of such a popular performer in cinema. The Tramp, in his wide popularity, his visible poverty, and his tendency to give rich people a kick in the bottom, came to 'speak for' half the world.
In Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem, a journalist, spends several issues acting as the voice of 'The New Scum,' the lowest rung of the social ladder in Ellis' radically distopic vision of America. They adopt him as their voice because they say he speaks for them, expresses their thoughts and feelings, and (this is important) that he implicitly sees the world from their point of view.
This is a representation of the cult of personality that can form around artists. Though they speak from a personal position, it coincides, and comes to stand for, the position of an entire community. The members of that community find a kind of personal expression through the act of reading, of receiving words, because what they're reading expresses their own opinions. "You said what I would have said, but because you have, I don't have to." The text is mass produced and widely distributed, so while reading it, the reader can be certain that someone else is reading it, too, and therefore the reader's opinion, as expressed by the text, is being disseminated. Reading becomes speech. The material is, then, a personal voice, of the artist and the audience, but also a community voice, because the audience is large and the artist is implicitly a member of the community. Even if these people never meet, and have only the art in common, they have a material, and felt, relationship with one another through the art.
Posted by orion at August 8, 2006 5:25 PM