If popularization becomes homologation (and why the public attacks those who criticize Angela, Prati & co.)

Why is the public so prone to attack critics who oppose the trivialization of culture? Why should phenomena such as Alberto Angela or Edoardo Prati be considered unassailable? Why is it that those who insist on the superficiality, homogenization, and flattening of certain cultural products (Alberto Angela’s documentaries, Edoardo Prati’s social forays, Roberto Celestri’s videos, and so on) and, at the same time, call for a raising of the level of popularization, are constantly being accused of snootiness, know-nothingness, arrogance, lack of understanding, envy, elitism, classism, and snobbery?

Meanwhile, a step back. Basically, the mechanism is not new. In criticism (art criticism, literary criticism, music criticism, film criticism, criticism of any genre) there is a pattern as old as criticism itself: the critic analyzes a cultural product specifically designed, researched and produced for wide consumption, he crushes it, and the audience that recognizes itself in that product tends to defend the object of the critique. It has been going on like this since the nineteenth century, since the origins of consumer literature, since someone discovered that it was possible to meet the tastes of a wide audience simply by removing any obstacle, by focusing the lens on the product itself, that is, by reducing the reason for interest in a book to the plot alone, which, moreover, had to be as simple and compelling as possible. Today almost no one could tell who a Luciano Zuccoli, an Umberto Notari or a Guido da Verona were. Yet they were three of the best-selling writers in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century: they managed to pull in three to five thousand copies a year of their successful novels (numbers that seem ridiculous today, but they must be compared to the Italy of the time, with little more than half the population of today, and with an illiteracy rate that in 1911 exceeded 40 percent of the population). Not even D’Annunzio could sell as much as they did. Guido da Verona, real name Guido Abramo Verona, was continually targeted by critics, to the point of publishing a book entitled Love Letter to the Tailors of Italy in which, writes Mauro Giocondi, an expert on consumer literature, “he declared that he didn’t give a damn about the remarks of the various critics and experts, and that he considered it an honor to be read by simple and uneducated readers, such as the tailors to whom he dedicated the book.”

The pattern has remained unchanged in the two centuries that separate us from the dawn of consumer literature. Recently, however, a new phenomenon has occurred: the emergence of cultural products that apply the same elements that have determined and continue to determine the success of consumer literature (or consumer cinema, or consumer music, and so on: engaging and accessible plots, typecasting, use of emotional elements that capture the audience’s attention, simplification of language, direct writing, fast pacing, winning clichés and formulas, conformity to expectations, immediate response to audience desires, and so on) even to what would once have been considered highbrow culture. It is simply not a matter of thinking about popularization tout court, popularization per se, because popularization has always existed: Michele Lessona, a sort of late nineteenth-century Piero Angela, one of the earliest popularizers of Italian history, published a book in 1869 entitled Volere è potere, a miscellany of biographies of Italians who had achieved success in art, science, letters, and industry through their willpower: in ten years (at that time the life of a book was quite long) it was able to sell thirty-four thousand copies, an extremely high number for the time. And high-level popularization also existed: limiting ourselves to art, it is sufficient to cite the example of Federico Zeri, who was very skilled at mastering the languages and times of television and the author of some successful books aimed at a wide audience. His Dietro l’immagine (Behind the Image), a collection of five lectures given in 1985 at the Cattolica University in Milan and addressed to a wide audience, remains one of the most luminous examples of art-historical popularization. And the same could be said for some books, even recent ones, by Vittorio Sgarbi (who made his debut in the field by reversing Zeri’s own book: his Davanti all’immagine also earned him a Bancarella).

Today, on television, we have to make do with popularizers who are allologists à la Alberto Angela or Aldo Cazzullo, while everything that is considered a little less superficial is confined to Rai5. That is, we have to be content with programs that focus everything on the most trite anecdotal, that reduce art to a plot ( Angela’s recent documentary on Van Gogh is an example of this), turn it into a pretext for confirming stereotypes and clichés that the public already knows and yet tends to like to hear about, that eliminate any form of complexity. And even this form of trivialization, it will certainly be possible to say, is not new: for a long time art has undergone a process of deliberate weakening, of removal of every restless or uncomfortable element, to end up being reduced to a “candy,” would have said Tommaso Labranca who has spoken at length about this phenomenon. We are used, he wrote in Vraghinaroda (2016), to “an art that is never disturbing, never ambiguous, never the starting point of a path that will lead you to discover something else and then something else again.” And he attributed this depowerment, essentially, to marketing: “Any cruel, effete, deviant artist can become kawaii: all it takes is to organize a large exhibition for him with imposing publicity battage, an interactive website, the dreamy preface in the catalog signed by the Councillor for Culture and written, however, by a third party, the album containing the most famous paintings brought back to the stroke with which to spend a relaxing zen evening coloring the spaces marked with numbers.” The names are the usual ones: Caravaggio, Van Gogh, the Impressionists, Frida Kahlo, partly Leonardo da Vinci. All who suffered the same fate.

What is new is that the so-called mainstream popularization, the fifteen percent share popularization, the popularization that reaches bookstores (but also the popularization of the armies of creators and influencers who populate Instagram and Tiktok: they are just less famous and more fragmented, and of Edoardo Prati who comes to Fazio there is only one in every who knows how many, but the vast majority of those who are successful among social users can be juxtaposed to this trend), instead of opposing this caramelization, we could call it, has instead gone along with it, embraced it, made it his own: that is why there is little difference between an Angela documentary on Van Gogh and a fiction (indeed: fiction is often better). There is no longer a Federico Zeri, there is not even a glimpse of an heir to Sgarbi, and there is no longer even, if you will, a Philippe Daverio, for reasons not so different from those for which it is becoming increasingly rare to read reviews of exhibitions. On television, the last barrier has also fallen: if fifty years ago, in front of a Pasolini who warned the public against the homogenization to which television would force us (and who for this position was criticized, even pointed at as a supporter of an aristocratic position), one could still find an Enzo Biagi who challenged him on the fact that in any case on television the public could find not only cheesemongers, but also Pasolini himself offering the public his point of view, today it is difficult to imagine something like that. If thirty or forty years ago a Federico Zeri was a rather regular presence on television, today there is no one who has taken his place.

Why then does the public tend to attack those who point out, admittedly even provocatively, that it is better to watch a reality show than to hear Alberto Angela talk about Van Gogh, or that Edoardo Prati is great at cosplaying the intellectual? It is a symptom of a cultural populism that, in its manifestation, has meanwhile reasons that, we might say, are rather immediate: an Angela or a Prati are perceived as reassuring, competent figures, capable of establishing an almost affective relationship with the public. The critic, on the other hand, is always the annoying, shadowy pain in the ass who is incapable of doing anything, and therefore merely criticizes. The critic is then seen as the figure who, by criticizing Angela, also criticizes the audience: it is like saying that one chooses a flattened or homogenized communication because one is undemanding or because one is unable to understand a Van Gogh beyond the narrative of his existence, his biography. This is not the case (the audience is smarter than people think), but it does not matter: it still triggers a defense mechanism of collective self-esteem. Alberto Angela is then perceived as one of the “few left,” and as a result he is seen as a beacon, a rare example of prime-time culture, reasoning that a criticism of an Angela is seen as a threat to something precious and fragile that needs to be defended at all costs (one only has to go to Raiplay or Rai5 to realize that there is also a rather extensive cultural offer from the public service). One could then consider these reactions as a reflection of the cultural tribalism that characterizes our times: the public, in other words, identifies itself in what it watches, in what it reads, in what it follows. Those who watch Alberto Angela’s programs, those who follow Fazio’s interviews, those who do not miss an episode of Gramellini’s debates, those who flood the reels of creators with thousands of followers with little hearts, like to present themselves as part of an Italy that loves culture, that does not watch reality and trash programs, that attends museums and exhibitions. Natural, then, that when someone criticizes an Angela, a Prati, a Gramellini, the group reacts. Then the familiarity with argued criticism has been completely lost: at most, today, they comment on social media. And so-called intellectuals often shy away from taking a position, from taking part in a debate where one may happen to take an uncomfortable posture, where one runs the risk of being perceived as one who is part of the ranks of the villains. In the palliative society it is up to one to be good at all costs.

Conversely, the public tends to extol the light and superficial cut of prime-time popularizers, the absence of upset from the narratives of anyone who has to present the work of a Van Gogh or a Caravaggio. And it is disarming, as well as frustrating, because it is not a matter of elitism. On the contrary, the critic usually tends to have a higher concept of the audience than the audience has of itself. When one says that the documentaries of Alberto Angela or the forays of an Edoardo Prati are perfect because they reach everyone one implicitly assumes that the highest the audience can aspire to is what is universally accessible, that complexity should be reduced to entertainment, that ease of access equals cultural quality. Those who take offense and react in a stymied and often even unhinged and violent manner to the critic are defending a model that undercuts it. He is, in practice, insulting himself and legitimizing a production that considers him capable only of accommodating superficial impulses. Guido da Verona used to say that it is an honor to write for dressmakers. More: if today the general public is demanding culture, it is right to treat it with due respect, as is done by those who believe that the general public is also capable of dealing with complexity. But demand tends to be met with an increasingly superficial, increasingly homogenized, increasingly flat supply. Some will say that it is better than nothing, that in any case there will be those in the public who will receive a stimulus to culture: meanwhile, it is difficult to believe that a stimulus can arise from a comfort zone, from a flat narrative. It is more likely that the stimulus will arise from the new, the non-immediate, the ambiguous, the unusual, the unconventional, that is, from situations that generate a desire for discovery. Alternatively, the risk is that everything remains confined to the scenography, to the stunning photograph that serves to frame the Wikipedia page on an artist, to the snippet that runs on social and disperses amidst videos of kittens. If even popularization becomes homologation, then we had better really turn off the television, better unplug social. And read one of the many contemporary Guido da Verona.

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