FORGET Osama bin Laden in his hideouts. Forget North Korea’s menace and Iran’s nuclear threats. The greatest danger to society is right here on our doorsteps — or at least it is if a new documentary by the conscience-rousing Hollywood director Robert Greenwald is to be believed. His latest release, Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price (to be screened at the Berlin Film Festival this weekend before coming to Britain in the spring), does for the gargantuan American retail outlet what Super Size Me did for the Big Mac.
This Arkansas-born colossus, landing like some alien craft at the edge of our cities, spreads like a plague through surrounding society, infecting the lifestyles of those too impoverished to resist it, and choking all competition. Slowly it strangles its “associates” — and if this term for “employees” seems a misrepresentation (they are more like indentured labourers) then wait until you see how the company cares for Chinese factory workers.
Glutting on a free-market system, Wal-Mart lays waste to the urban community as we recognise it. Small businesses wither and town centres die. And now this monster is over here. It has already swallowed down the Asda chain whole. You can barely see the lump.
Scary or what? You will never go back into the supermarket again. Or will you? Will you change your mind after you have lugged kneebone-battering carrier bags down the high street or been issued a parking ticket while you popped into the deli or paid 74p for three carrots in the organic shop? The truth is that this Goliath profits from an ethos already rife in our culture. It is simply the most successful of a species that can quickly grow fat as it feeds on the expectations of a fast-paced, consumerist society. And who can fight it? Even high culture capitulates. It probably always has. Artists, after all, are only peddling a product — much like a washing-machine except rather less practical.
Shakespeare did not write plays out of a spirit of pure altruism. Raphael would not have painted his frescoes for fun. Hardly surprising, then, that contemporary aesthetics are extruded on an industrial scale. Mass-produced art no longer means velvet Elvises and pipe-puffing dogs playing poker. It means the stuff that stacks our bookshop shelves, crams our record stores and lines the warehouse-sized spaces of our galleries and museums.
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Artists are peddled like brands. Damien Hirst can sell anything — from rows of dots to old ashtrays. Pop in to see the show of Martin Kippenberger’s work that opened yesterday at the Tate. Prodigiously prolific, he served as the CEO of a vast art production outfit.
Why fight the phenomenon? The artist’s job after all is in part to record and reflect his society; to keep pace at the very least and, at best, to outrun the field.
Of course, mass production tends to come at the cost of traditional quality. We live in a world in which a Tracey Emin scribble is valued more than many Old Masters, in which we prefer the cut price “own-brand” imitation (the latest chick lit, yet another boy band) to anything untried. Most new housing projects have as much to do with architecture as tinned peas have to do with the freshly snapped pod. But who cares, if they fit the menu? And besides, there are plenty of additives to make the mess palatable. Attach a skimpily clad babe to an old violin, and a tune will slip down as easily as piped music along a supermarket aisle.
A mass-produced aesthetic, endlessly pumped out and reproduced, franchised throughout the country by multitudinous arts organisations, grows increasingly dilute.
But is it from this weak solution that something more complex can crystallise? Is this the moment when a criticism of a monster such as Wal-Mart can at last have effect? Has the time at last come when we actually want to swap the regulation smile and the lump of processed cheddar for a bit of old-fashioned English grousing and a Crottin de Chavignol?
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When Samuel Beckett, whose centenary is being celebrated next month, was asked how it was that a culturally stagnating country, such as Ireland then was, could have produced so many great writers in such a short period, he offered a terse but telling reply: “It’s the priests and the British . . . they have buggered us into existence. After all, when you are in the last bloody ditch there is nothing left but to sing.”