Dyer, Richard
2002
Only Entertainment
1
“Entertainment is an idea, one that is both historically and culturally specific. While pleasure has surely always been intended and taken in artefacts and performances, the idea of entertainment is distinctive in its emphasis on the primacy of such pleasure, ahead or even instead of practical, sacred, instructional or political aims and functions. This is touched on in chapters 2 and 5 (‘The idea of entertainment’, ‘Entertainment and utopia’). Cultural developments since 1900 suggest that entertainment, at any rate in the forms discussed here, may also be historically specific in another sense, namely that it may now be on the way out, and this is addressed in a brief, speculative concluding essay, ‘The waning of entertainment’.”
“[Art] either seeks to denigrate entertainment because it is not art (not formally perfect, accomplished or innovative, not emotionally deep, with nothing interesting to say about the world) or tries to show that such-and-such an instance of entertainment is really, or also, art; either way, the issue of what entertainment is is side-stepped.”
“Discussion of ideology on the other hand tends to treat entertainment as a sugar on the pill of ideological messages, either condemning it as a disguise for world views of which the writer disapproves or else commending it as a strategy for promoting those of which she or he does approve. Once again, though, what entertainment is is not addressed.”
2
“the fact that an entertainment entertains does not let it off the hook of social responsibility, does not make up for sexism, racism or any other deleterious ism.”
3
“My polemical intent with these brief pieces (and the references to the news as entertainment in ‘Entertainment and utopia’) is to unsettle the assumption that things that enjoy high cultural prestige are not in fact informed by the same entertainment values as those that are not – perhaps the former are just entertainment for highbrows.”
-> Art is entertainment for the high-brows.
“However I do also suspect that, amid all the current academic discussion of pleasure, desire, jouissance and carnival, entertainment is still not taken seriously as a topic.”
6
“If all these things can be entertainment, then clearly entertainment is not so much a category of things as an attitude towards things.”
“Entertainment became identified with what was not art, not serious, not refined. This distinction remains with us – art is what is edifying, élitist, refined, difficult, whilst entertainment is hedonistic, democratic, vulgar, easy. That the distinction is harmful, false to the best in both what is called art and what is called entertainment, has often been commented upon. But it remains one built into our education and, as we shall see, the decisions of television programmers.”
”
19
“It is important, I think, to stress the cultural and historical specificity of entertainment. The kinds of performance produced by professional entertainment are different in audience, performers and above all intention to the kinds of performance produced in tribal, feudal, or socialist societies.”
Definition-entertainment:
“entertainment is a type of performance produced for profit, performed before a generalized audience (the ‘public’), by a trained, paid group who do nothing else but produce performances which have the sole (conscious) aim of providing pleasure.”
19f
“Because entertainment is produced by professional entertainers, it is also largely defined by them. That is to say, although entertainment is part of the coinage of everyday thought, none the less how it is defined, what it is assumed to be, is basically decided by those people responsible (paid) for providing it in concrete form. Professional entertainment is the dominant agency for defining what entertainment is.”
20
“Two of the taken-for-granted descriptions of entertainment, as ‘escape’ and as ‘wish-fulfilment’, point to its central thrust, namely, utopianism. Entertainment offers the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide.”
175
“Entertainment of the kind discussed in these pages depends for its forms and appeals on the notion of escapism, and this in turn entails a sense of there being something that is not entertainment, that needs to be escaped from. Entertainment is thus apart, different, special, a treat. Yet the bases for that sense of entertainment have undergone such profound alterations in the past half-century that entertainment may now be ceasing to be a viable cultural category.”
“There is no decline, for those with money and access, in the taking of pleasure. On the contrary, we may have entered the most hedonistic period the world has ever known. The word entertainment can be, and always has been, used to speak of the many ways in which people may take pleasure – we entertain people with dinner, in jokes and gossip, we entertain ourselves in hobbies and sports. In this widest sense there is no decline in entertainment; indeed, quite the reverse. What may be in eclipse, though, is the provision of entertainment in artefacts and performances based on a dynamic of separation and escape. This can be traced in technological, geographic and social developments as well as in changes in the content and forms of the arts and media.”
“Before the 1920s, entertainment was something you went to or perhaps did at home on special occasions.”
“The gramophone and radio were the first technologies to alter this.”
176
“with the internet, performance is not even necessarily professionally provided (except by technicians facilitating commercial web sites) – music, drama, all kinds of performances and visual expressions are now as likely to be amateur as professional, and anyone may be both a provider and a consumer of entertainment.”
-> Mention produsage here?
“These changes in the time and place of pleasurable performances are of a piece with changes in the social organization of production and consumption.”
-> Workplaces like Facbook or Google look more fun than work. Work in the entertainment industries has often become extremely dry and bureaucratic instead of a love of doing it. Childcare is not entirely at home or supported by the community (hippies), it’s bits of everything with working moms.
177
“Along with these socio-techno-geographic changes go widespread cultural changes. Entertainment has got in everywhere.” -> Entertainment economy/culture/whatever.
“And, to the degree that everything becomes entertainment, entertainment itself ceases to be a category.”
“Entertainment classically dealt in glamour, utopia, the exotic, the extraordinary, the exceptional, enjoyment through imagining other worlds or ways of being. However, through the twentieth century, people increasingly wanted to take pleasure in people like themselves, realities like their own.”
178
“The subject matter of entertainment is no longer how much more beautiful or exciting life could be but rather an assurance that life as it is is entertaining.”
179
“This is why I speak of entertainment waning, since this both emphasizes the gradualness of the process and, if the metaphor holds true, of the possibility of it being a temporary phase before entertainment waxes again.”
“the eclipsing of entertainment represents a closing of the gap between an awareness of what is and imagination of what could or should be.”
“the waning of entertainment risks weakening the ability to be critical of the way things are by feeling how else they might be. And the way things are is that some can live a life that does not need its moments of entertainment while most labour to make it possible. The waning of entertainment might merely confirm the comfortable overclass of Western society in the rightness of its life while extinguishing even the tawdriest visions of happiness for the rest of the world.”