At the time I was seventeen, a boiling mass of zits and testosterone, but unlike every teenager since I had practically no experience of popular culture. You were not allowed to listen to the radio at school and in any case the word "radio" didn't mean something you held in your hand; it meant a largish cabinet on which my parents would sometimes listen to the six o'clock news. I had heard of rock-'n-roll but not actually listened to it.

"If a society is to thrive, to really work, its values have to be strong enough to attract a continuous inflow of outsiders who want to adopt them, adapt them, pass them along to the next generation."

At school we did not see the daily papers, and we were never let out to go to the movies, although on rare occasions an improving film, usually based on a classic, like Julius Caesar or Great Expectations, would be screened for the senior boys. As for television, there was no television in Australia and would not be for another three years. What we had was books, and football, and weirdly inaccurate dreams of convent girls. In sum, I could hardly have been more protected from the degrading effects of mass culture if I had been the child of Robert Bork himself.

Anyway, there I was at my desk, supposedly studying a Latin textbook. What I was actually reading was something modern and French: the poems of Guillaume Apollinaire, the friend of Picasso and Braque, one of the literary voices of Cubism, translated by the American scholar and critic Roger Shattuck. This was off the curriculum and fairly forbidden fruit. And I turned the page and encountered a poem entitled Zone, published in 1913, 25 years before I was born. 1913 seems almost archaeology now, but it didn't then, especially not to a kid who had been brought up on Virgil and Shakespeare, Homer and Lewis Carroll. And the first lines jumped out at me:

At last you are tired of this ancient world
O shepherdess Eiffel Tower, the flock of bridges
bleats this morning
You're fed up with living in Greek and Roman
antiquity . . .
You read handbills, catalogs, advertisements that
sing aloud
Here's your morning's poetry, and for prose there
are the newspapers,
Dime detective novels packed with adventures,
Biographies of big shots, a thousand different
titles,
Lettering on billboards and on walls,
Doorplates and posters squawk like parrots . . .

Well, I thought, what a marvelous idea. There's a whole imaginative world out there that a French poet thought was not only legitimate, but thrilling and liberating. And I know so little about it. It doesn't replace the classics, the canon: it just lives side by side with it. Maybe it's not either/or. Maybe it's both/and. Maybe I can get a handle on it when I get out of here.

Thus, at a very distant remove both in time and in space, I got my first faint, vague inkling of one of the main driving forces of modern culture: the interplay between high and low, the way that vernaculars insert themselves and their images into art, or find themselves reclassified as art, to the discomfiture of some and the pleasure, even the enlightenment, of others.

Apollinaire was born in 1880. By his thirtieth birthday, he had witnessed the early stages of a cultural mass that had begun to rise in Europe in the mid-19th century. It was the birth of the gigantic continent of images that now surrounds us: the culture of mass production and mass reproduction, of posters and billboards, of marketing and sales pitches, of photography, popular entertainment on a previously unheard-of scale, of music-halls and spectacles in arenas that no ancient Roman had ever imagined, of promotional pseudo-events, of recorded music, movies, radio and, eventually, television. It seemed utterly chaotic, a desire-industry without limits. No rules appeared to govern its growth and no existing cultural etiquette offered much guidance in coming to terms with its fantasies. But at every step of its growth, artists felt impelled to adapt to it, to find inspiration in it, to let it into their work -- as a way of relief from the dead hand of monocultural impulses.

Popular culture stood for modernity. It was what distinguished the present from the past. It demanded acknowledgement from the genuinely creative, from those writers and artists who were not simply defensive. And as a result it began, early on, to wind itself into what we conventionally call "high art."

Now this interchange had been going on, at lesser intensity, well before the 19th century. The plays of Shakespeare were popular entertainment, otherwise they would never have survived. The idea for the Magic Flute, that most sublime of serio-comic operas, actually began when its librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, asked Mozart to compose the music for a puppet-show about a wicked magician. And Romanticism filled the music and literature of Europe with back-references to every kind of popular and folk expression: rituals, ballads, songs, festivals.

It set writers, scholars and musicians free to examine and mine their traditional cultures, to use their motifs without embarrassment, to use the "provincial" as a counterweight to the cosmopolitan, aristocratic culture that set earlier norms. Think of William Tell, the rebellious mediaeval hero of 19th-century Swiss nationalism ; or the poets of the Catalan Renaixenca, reinstating Catalan folklore, myth and language as an answer to the imperial Castilian culture of Madrid ; or of the rediscovery of all manner of national epics, from Norway to Iceland ; of the excavation of folk-stories and fairy tales by Grimm, of Scots traditional poetry by Walter Scott, of Irish melodies by Moore, or the use of traditional dances and songs by Tchaikovsky. All this spoke of the freshness of the old, of traditions that weren't authoritarian.

It is true that conservatives, as well as nationalist radicals, could use the folkloric past to their own designs, idealizing what was static and pious in it. But the merging mass popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th century didn't have those associations ; it was entirely new, and so it was ready-made as a source for artists who were fascinated by newness--the avant-garde.

In painting, this relationship begins rather tentatively, around 1890, with the Post-Impressionists. Thus although we are right to see a great painter like Georges Seurat, with his bewitching stillness and architectural clarity, as the heir of Piero della Francesca, he was not shy about taking his motifs for ecstatic movement from the wild compositions of the most popular advertising artist in Paris, Jules Cheret.

We're used to the way that Andy Warhol's silkscreen paintings in the 1960s mimicked the smudginess and graininess of newsprint, but Vincent van Gogh was 80 years ahead of him: he loved not only Japanese prints, whose color was highly sophisticated, but also the crude discordant and even brutal colors of mass industrial printing, which could give his work, he said, the effect of a chromolithograph from a cheap shop.

But the great irruption of the popular into the high came with Cubism, in direct response to the new landscape of print and signs. Words started coming into the paintings of Picasso and Braque, as they had covered the walls of cities through advertising: painted words, and fragments of actual newsprint glued onto the paper or the canvas: fragmentary, punning, and always redolent of the sense of speed and image-overload that mass culture produced. Then the tempo of overload was stepped up by the Futurists and by the Dada collages of Kurt Schwitters. The products of modern society were being used to change art, and not vice versa: they had a raw in-your-face energy that hadn't existed in art before, but which mirrored the discontinuity of modern life.

Later artists like Jean Dubuffet got interested in graffiti, the lowest of the low, the primitive art of the urban crowd. Comic strips came into the orbit of painting: the Catalan surrealist Joan Miro, for instance, seems to have been deeply influenced by the work of that great and inventive American artist George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat.

In particular, the German and French avant-gardes before World War II were fascinated by what was coming out of America, that limitless source of popular-cultural imagery. America was huge, crass, commercialized to the bone, and bursting with a vitality that seemed totally indifferent to formal culture. The Dadaist Man Ray warned his fellow-Dadaist Francis Picabia that no Dada gesture could make any imprint on New York, because New York was already Dada incarnate.

By a strange but entirely comprehensible irony, this meant that cultural forms developed by some Americans were taken seriously as high art in Europe long before they were accepted as such in America. A vivid example was in music. Whereas most white Americans around 1910-20 condescendingly thought of cakewalk, ragtime and jazz as mere jungle-music, French composers since the 1890s had taken it with the utmost seriousness, recognizing it for what it was: the great, indigenous American musical form. Darius Milhaud, Maurice Ravel, and Claude Debussy all embraced it and were influenced by it, and for Igor Stravinsky jazz meant "a wholly new sound in my music . . . my final break with the Russian orchestral school in which I had been fostered." Jazz was only one part of a field of American popular culture that Europeans admired without reservation. On the whole they wouldn't get closely interested in, let alone influenced by, American high art -- painting or literature -- until after the Second World War.

Whereas modernist American artists took almost as long to get interested in their own popular culture. You can see traces and fitful appearance of such an interest in the twenties and thirties. In Stuart Davis, for instance with his rapid-fire billboard imagery, his logos that predict Pop art before most of the Pop artists were born, and his belief that, as he put it, "the artist should be a cool spectator-reporter at the center of hot events." In Edward Hopper, whose visions of lonely people in rooms with slanting light were deeply affected by his love of theater and the movies ; in due course, popular culture would pay him the compliment of re-absorbing his images, and to this day no single artist has had more effect on the look of American film and stage design. But on the whole, until the emergence of Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the 1950s, American painters (with the exception of de Kooning, who had been trained as a commercial artist in Holland and loved American ads and movies) shied away from vernacular forms. They felt embarrassed and threatened by their strength. They were after what they considered a nobler quarry: transcendentalism, the sublime, a new way into the religious aspirations of 19th-century American landscape -- via abstraction. The Abstract Expressionists would sooner have slit their collective throat than let American popular culture impinge on their work.

Europeans knew American power very well by the late 1940s ; but how did they see American culture? It was comic-books and Cadillacs, bubble-gum, Spam, Hollywood movies and the mushroom cloud. Jazz, of course, and some American writers were admired: Faulkner, Hemingway. But American painting, sculpture, theater, dance, orchestral music? America looked naive, swollen with production and pleasure, in contrast to the pinched and traumatized life of a Europe flattened by bombs, a Europe which (counting Russia) had lost forty million people, mostly civilians, in less than ten years. America was a fictive paradise full of lies about how consumption gave social happiness. It was the place an artist escaped from, in order to mature in Europe.

Not surprisingly, most American intellectuals also took this view. The real artist was the one who worked against the grain of American vulgarity, who aspired to a European complexity and subtlety and felt alienated at home. To feel thoroughly at home, easy in one's skin (rarely possible for an artist anyway) was to surrender to masscult, to an empire of commercial signs and thoughtless patriotism. If Americans were happy wallowing in that, they were culturally deluded. This scheme of total alienation within America was summed up by the art critic Clement Greenberg in 1947:

Our difficulty in acknowledging and stating the dull horror of our lives has helped prevent the proper and energetic development of American art [since 1925] . . . [For serious American artists] their isolation is inconceivable, crushing, unbroken, damning. That anyone can produce art on a respectable level . . . is highly improbable. What can fifty do against 140,000,000?

There you had it: the American artist under the heel of all other Americans, locked in weak but noble opposition to a country which attached no value, monetary or spiritual, to his work. The heroism of failure, against a mass of unauthentic kitsch identified by Greenberg -- and after him, by other writers like Dwight Macdonald -- as "movies, tap-dancing, slick commercial fiction, comics and popular songs." In the forties and fifties, Trotskyites like Greenberg and Macdonald despised American popular culture because it was capitalist, something manufactured by overlords to deceive and coarsen the masses. In the late 80s and 90s, reformed left-wingers turned conservative extremists, like Hilton Kramer, want to demonize it because it supposedly enshrines liberal values, alias moral anarchy. To such critics any traffic with popular culture, any approval of it, implies a sinister relaxation of values. But when I read their jeremiads I think of the eminently sensible words of Susan Sontag, in Notes on Camp, back in 1964 --

Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves. But there are other creative sensibilities besides the seriousness (both tragic and comic) of high culture . . . And one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may feel or do on the sly.

The idea that high art and popular culture are enemies, zoned off from one another by their very nature, reminds me of the long and largely unprofitable arguments about multiculturalism in America. The multicultural issue is always raising its head in immigrant societies, like America or my native Australia. The historical reason is, at root, fairly simple: it's competition, the fear of established immigrant groups that the culture and folkways, not to mention the political power that they have, will be diluted or even taken away by more recent arrivals. The short-term response to this is to utter gloomy warnings about how the fragile, irreducible cultural essence of America is about to be fatally damaged by exotic invasion. This habit has been going on since the 18th century, when Benjamin Franklin warned that the American language was going to be swamped by the arrival of what he called the "Palatine boors," namely German and Dutch immigrants to Pennsylvania, and to judge by the current conservative worries over the Hispanicisation of America by Mexican immigrants it shows no sign of abating.

In the long term, however, the result of mixture and migration is enrichment, an infusion of the energies that keep cultures vital. There is a practical, non-ideological understanding of multi-culti. Which is that people with different roots can co-exist, that they can learn to read the image-banks of others, that they can and should look across the frontiers of race, language, creed, gender and age without prejudice or illusion, and learn to think about others against the background of a hybridized society. This idea proposes, modestly enough, that some of the most interesting things in history and culture happen at the interface between cultures. It wants to deal with border situations, not only because they can be so interesting in themselves, but because understanding them may bring with it a little hope for the world. Out of the hybrid comes vitality, through extension of the gene pool. It has always been so in genetics, and so it is in culture as well. Including the mixtures and matings between high and popular art, those labile categories that get less distinct as our century moves to its end.

The idea of a monoculture, jealously preserving its own homogeneity, its self-sufficiency, its isolation from the rest of the world and its exclusion of outsiders, is a useful fantasy for cultural nationalists. But it is no more than that. At their origins, all great cultures are multi ; from those different points of origin, over long spans of time, they achieve syntheses that define themselves. The 18th-century English Whig gentleman in his Palladian house was the product of long mixture and collision between Celts, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Normans and God knows how many other cultural strains. Out of mixture, systems of values are developed that ensure social cohesion.

If a society is to thrive, to really work, its values have to be strong enough to attract a continuous inflow of outsiders who want to adopt them, adapt them, pass them along to the next generation. This process is dynamic ; it is always in change. Today, we are apt to think of Imperial China as an archetypal monoculture -- self-sufficient, closed to outside influences, the symbol of that shutting-off being the biggest security fence in the world, the Great Wall, whose construction began in the late 3rd century BC to keep out nomadic invaders from the West. But in fact, the Han Dynasty, which began within a few years of the commencement of the Wall, was extraordinarily open to foreign influence and would not be remembered as a golden age if it had not been. Its art was deeply cosmopolitan, absorbing ideas and forms through contact not only with Korea, Vietnam and Central Asia, but also, along the silk and sea routes, with Iran, Hellenistic Greece and Rome.

The same process has always happened in Europe, too. For instance, there is a Spanish saying, Mestizaje es grandeza: mixture is greatness. It comes from deep historical experience. In the 8th century AD Spain was invaded and largely conquered by the Arabs. Between the 12th and 15th centuries, the south of Spain, Hispano-Arabic Andalusia, became a brilliant multicultural civilization, built over the ruins of ancient Roman colonies, mingling Western with middle-Eastern forms, glorious in its lyric invention and adaptive tolerance. What architecture surpasses that of the Alhambra in Granada, or the Great Mosque of Cordoba? The passage of cultural meaning through mixture is so universal that the only perfect example of a monoculture is probably Easter Island, one of the most isolated specks of land on the globe. When Europeans arrived there in 1722 they saw, with astonishment, its hundreds of great stone trunks and heads, weighing up to 80 tons -- the moai, as they were called. What did they mean? How had they got there? The Rapanui, the native inhabitants, could offer no clue. They knew no more about their meaning or technology than the Europeans did. At first, therefore, the visitors assumed that the Rapanui had arrived after the death of an earlier megalithic culture which had created them. But this was wrong. The Rapanui's ancestors had indeed created them, between 1000 and 1500 AD. But marooned for centuries in complete isolation and in a stage of frequent internal war, deprived of all outside contact or stimulus, the natives gradually forgot their cultural heritage: nothing provoked them to explain, defend or remember it. It was as enigmatic to them as to the Europeans. Perfect cultural purity led to perfect cultural sterility.

This is a useful fable to remember when people talk about the impurities visited upon high art by the supposed intrusions of popular culture. For it is the lesson of modernism that these so-called intrusions from below have led to great clarifications, to expansions of language, to leaps of vividness that an immutably Mandarin culture, fixated on its own notions of high art alone, cannot produce. But they have also tended to create a game without self-evident or settled rules, where, as the artist Fernand Leger once said, "No tribunal exists to settle the dispute over beauty." Hence the conservative longing for a modernism that excludes the demotic and the vernacular. But such a modernism doesn't fit our cultural experience any more. There's no contradiction attached to liking both Tiepolo and Doonesbury, both country-and-western and Mozart.

The task is to distinguish, without snobbery or condescension, between the good stuff, the absolute crap, and everything that lies between within each of the myriad forms that make up our cultural mosaic. And this, I take it, will be a matter of some heated argument between you all over the next day or two.

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