How we’re all manipulated in everyday life
WE live in an era in which image memes are lobbed as political salvos. In which security is “theatre” and defining who controls the “narrative” in a world of facts and alternative facts is the daily bread of the hot-take class. In which words are bombs, delivered in 140-character instalments in the “new culture war” – a phrase that can and has referred to all manner of cultural conflicts: The face-off between elite versus populists, urban versus rural, Hollywood versus the American heartland.
Culture is a weapon – a pretty effective one at that. And it’s a topic that New York-based curator Nato Thompson takes on in his book Culture As Weapon, which explores the ways the tools of culture are deployed to do everything from sell iPhones to wage war.
As far as timing goes, the book’s landing during the early days of US President Donald Trump’s administration couldn’t have been more impeccable. Culture As Weapon provides a broad overview on how individuals, corporations and governments employ design, storytelling, imagery, and art to stir emotion and mould sentiment. The prominence of the Internet and social media makes this all the more profound and far-reaching than in the past.
Thompson’s book kicks off with an extensive historical primer. Over the course of the 20th century, the fields of public relations and advertising created visually resonant cultural icons – such as the Marlboro Man – to move merchandise. Thompson shows how political figures have employed those same techniques to sway elections and stoke fear.
For example: the 198 8 presidential campaign ad for George H.W. Bush about Willie Horton, the Massachusetts convict who raped a woman while on furlough – an ad that ignited anxiety about crime (and African American men) and likely cost early contender Michael Dukakis the election.
Thompson also provides a backgrounder on how visual symbols have been historically wielded socially and politically. The Nazis, for example, were famously meticulous about their aesthetics during WWII. Adolf Hitler himself devoted great care and attention to the design and look of the Nazi flag.
“The Nazis loved culture,” notes Thompson. “They used culture. They distributed culture. Cinema, music, flags, banners, book burnings, rallies, and holidays were all deployed in a phantasmagoria of stark blood red, swastikas, and blinding white.”
Interestingly, political groups have also been perfectly happy to co-opt the symbols of those they impugn. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, decried so-called degenerate art – anything Modernist or made by Jews – even as he put that art on view in an extraordinarily well-attended touring exhibition titled, naturally, Degenerate Art.
A similar phenomenon occurred during the US culture wars of the 198 0s and 1990s, when Congress attacked some of the artists funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. “The NEA hubbub,” writes Thompson, “was an opportunity to condemn luridness and bask in it in equal measure.” An artist’s own work weaponised against him. (The Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts are part of a long-running conservative animosity toward the NEA.)
The look back is interesting, and Thompson delivers priceless instances of cultural manipulation, such as when the American Tobacco Co used the trappings of women’s liberation to encourage women to smoke in the late 1920s.
But far more vital are the chapters the author devotes to the recent past and the present – to the ways in which big business and government have liberally borrowed from culture for their purposes. (He comes at these topics from the left, with a healthy scepticism of capitalism and its habit of turning everything into sellable merch.)
Thompson examines how art and architecture have been used as an implement of urban development, via so-called starchitectural development projects and family-friendly public art installations such as Cows On Parade. “The commodification of bohemia,” as he calls it, has led to art being viewed as an “engine” rather than the cultural mirror of a nation. The NEA’s motto, for example, has gone from “Because a great nation deserves great art” to “Art works” – a model that “would no longer be focused on excellence based on taste”, writes Thompson, “but rather on the way that culture could make things happen”.
This, interestingly, has led to “an increasing mistrust toward the idea of culture itself.” Los Angeles offers a vivid (but not included) case in point: The anti-gentrification efforts in Boyle Heights have specifically targeted art galleries.
Culture As Weapon covers myriad other topics: How the US military employed cultural anthropologists during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, how staged social relationships are as intriguing to artists as they are to corporations, and how culture informs our everyday retail experiences. (The layout of Ikea is inspired, in part, by the ramps of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York.)
In taking on so much disparate material, Culture As Weapon can feel scattered and often delves into topics that the reader is likely already familiar with. (Do we need to read again of the improbable rise of the personal computer from Steve Jobs’ garage to our back pocket?)
Thompson is at his most effective when he is dissecting what it is about culture that makes it such a potent social tool. Art, in its appeal to emotion, can override rationality. “Fear,” he writes, “motivates faster than hope” and “appeals to emotion do not rely on the truth.”
How the rational brain might counter the barrage of cultural string-pulling that we experience on a daily basis, and how the world of culture might save itself from becoming a mere tool, Thompson doesn’t say. But Culture As Weapon provides a compelling manual for determining how the manipulation begins. – Los Angeles Times/ Tribune News Service