It's time to embrace American culture again

[Dave Monroe]

Jonathan Jones on Art
It's time to embrace American culture again
An Obama victory will hopefully bring down the curtain on a period of
self-defeating anti-American ignorance


"America flips a coin", as The Simpsons put it in a classic Halloween
parody of Clinton v Dole back in the 1990s. Except this time the coin
will determine so much about America's relationship with the rest of
the world. A country stands poised to leap in international eyes from
zero to hero. And yet, this has happened before, sort of. It's truly
amazing how profoundly American elections shape the culture of an era.
In the two-term Clinton presidency, it was OK for the European Left to
love America. I certainly went on a journey. I remember as a student
in the Reagan era sitting in a police cell after a demonstration,
telling jokes about the shuttle astronauts. But when I actually got to
see the US they had a charismatic Democrat in the White House, we
still had John Major, and the liberal east coast seemed a utopian land
of coffee, conceptual art and free cable. Now a new generation of
Europeans may allow themselves to recognise America's strengths.

If all goes to script tonight, the arts will benefit vastly. It cannot
be good for our culture to live a lie. We have been doing that for
some years now. The monstrosity of the Bush administration has
disfigured a nation. This has led to entirely unjust fictions being
swallowed about American culture. Just recently, Horace Engdahl,
permanent secretary of the Nobel Academy, opined that the American
novel is conservative and hidebound compared with European fiction.
How can any literary critic have missed the greatness, and
experimentalism, of a Thomas Pynchon? But I am absolutely certain that
some readers in their twenties in this country have missed out on
Pynchon, not to mention Roth, Updike and all those other giants,
because they don't want to read American novels. You can see this
reflected in British writing. In the 1980s it was universally agreed
by leading novelists that American fiction since 1945 was the paragon,
the model to follow. Martin Amis played richly with American plots
and, indeed, American prose in Money and London Fields. And that was a
better time for the British novel. This year's Booker prize reveals
the decline since then: confused, pretentious ideas of what
constitutes good fiction abound in a world determined to reject
American examples, even when these are the best we could follow. If
this election turns out right, a sensible reaction might be for the
Booker to finally include American novels.

Of all the arts, literature has suffered the greatest corruption by
anti-Americanism. We share a language, after all. Anyone who cares
about writing and denies themselves the joy of its American expression
must be nuts. In general, the joke of these years is that high
American culture has been more excluded from Britain than the trashy
culture which we somehow don't censor in the same way. So you can see
all the American television you want but there ain't no Richard Serra
in Tate Modern. But it looks like the age of self-deceit is over.
There are obviously so many reasons to be happy about what may be the
most important American election ever. But one is that it will end
Britain's dreary phase of anti-American ignorance.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2008/nov/04/american-culture-jonathan-jones