Do East Coast artists really seek out things from middle America and mock them?

I can’t put my finger on any specific examples at the moment, but it seems to me there’s a bit of a trope or theme or whatever that performance or visual artists in New York or elsewhere on the East Coast will go out to middle America and seek out example of that culture for the purpose of holding it up to ridicule.

(OK, I can think of one pretentious example, though I’m sure noone’s heard of it: in an excerable book called Underworld by Don DeLillo, there’s some young artsy fartsy filmmaker in the 1970s who becomes fixated on reading about some lady in a town called Normal Illinois who’s afflicted by some kind of psychosomatic illnesses, and because she lives in a town called “Normal” he thinks it’s just too precious, or whatever. I was losing interest by that point . . .)

Anybody know what I’m talking about? Is it/was it a real phenomenon among the artsy fartsy circles?

Of course, I’m aware of Andy Warhol, but (from what little I understand of him) he seemed to be celebrating consumer culture more than mocking it, though perhaps a bit of both.

Some East Coast artist mocking something from the MidWest? Sure, 100% chance. Is it widespread? That is tricky.

You know the painting American Gothic (Man with pitchfork and an unfriendly look next to a dour wife)? Is that painting a tribute to the simple honest folk of the MidWest, or is it making fun of the common clay? We simply do not know as Wood (the painter) seems to have indicated both at different times.

I have always considered that painting a great test of how the viewer feels about the MidWest. You see in it what you already believe.

It’s quite clear that the couple in American Gothic are intended to be father and spinster daughter, not husband and wife:

What is meant by the painting is less clear, but Grant Wood insisted that it wasn’t meant as a parody. It’s called “gothic” because of the design of the window, incidentally.

I think it’s far more common for people from the East Coast to be blind to any cultural differences between the Midwest and the East Coast than to care enough to want to parody them. That is, their reaction to being told of any such cultural differences would sometimes be to be surprised that those differences exist, but it would be quite rare to want to mock them. Besides, people are constantly moving back and forth in this country. The differences aren’t that big.

Incidentally, I talked with someone from Normal, Illinois just this summer, and she says that people living there make jokes about the name of the town.

You don’t really have a point here, do you? I mean, you wield the words “pretentious” and “artsy-fartsy” like flaming brands to keep that fancy book-learning away. Having said that, I agree that Underworld disappears up its own arse shortly after the sequence at the baseball ground. That bit, however, is astonishing. Just magnificent writing.

Yeah, I’m 100% convinced that he didn’t intend to mock this stuff, however his art might have come across.

Any Lichtenstein fans here, though? I don’t know much about his motives, but I’ve always had the sense that he’s mocking the institution of commercialized art and American entertainment at once.

Lighten up, Francis.

Yeah, as much as I’m afeared of book learnin, reading and enjoying that segment (for free) in some magazine or other persuaded me to shell out 30-odd bucks to read the subsequent 1,000 pages of dreck. No, I’m not bitter.

I think that happened to a lot of people (to the point that the opening segment was later published on its own). I know I never got past the “Pafko at the Wall” portion of that novel. Too bad - if you’d waited six months or so, you could have found Underworld for under ten bucks on any remainders shelf in America. :slight_smile:

A good number of those East Coast artists hail from middle America. So they are using their own background–sometimes in a mocking way. (Grant Wood was born in Anamosa, Iowa.) Visual artists, especially, often move to NYC–which is still the commercial center of the Art Biz in the USA.

And some artists who use The East as their subject matter will throw in some satire or even bitter condemnation.

You really need to check out more art!

Clear from the painting? How?

I know the link says that the model was embarrassed that people would think that the guy was her husband because he was so much older but doesn’t that suggest that since people assumed it was her husband that it’s not clear?

She also said she did not want people to think she really dressed like that. Great painting.

Check out Ray Bradbury’s short story, “The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse.” It’s about this trope . . . at least, to start with . . .

I think that people on the East Coast do think of themselves as a different tribe from Middle America, and one of the things that tribes do is mock other tribes. It happens the other way round too but Middle America doesn’t have the megaphone that being part of the tastemaking cultural elite gives you.

Well, fuck me – Ray Bradbury?! (He’s the greatest sci-fi writer in history.)

When Middle America does have the opportunity to mock liberal/elite/East Coasters, does it come out something like King of the Hill?

I think King of the Hill even had an ep like this phenomenon, from the POV of the Middle Americans. Peggy starts painting and some art guy presents her as a barely literate hillbilly who somehow can create art.

On The Road With Austin And Santino” sends two of the most east-coast Project Runway contestants out into deepest Middle America to do makeovers, and it’s really all very friendly and sweet.

N.B.: This isn’t just a regional thing. There are plenty of “Middle Americans” on the coasts, and not a few cultural-elitist pockets in the Midwest, the West and the Deep South.

Bradbury’s “The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse,” mentioned above, is about a middle-class New Yorker who is so utterly dull that some Greenwich Village bohemians find him fascinating. (This was written in 1954, when there were middle-class people in Manhattan.)

There still are. They just live in the shittier apartments or take up a ghetto like existence in the Heights.

Grant Wood was a born, educated and taught in the midwest. He did later study art in Europe though that was in between early education in art, early teaching and later teaching in the midwest.