The knowledge of art is revealed, in the modern world, by a variety of mechanical and economic means, for which history had provided no parallel; the techniques of photography and of reproduction, working in concert with the opening of new markets for “cultural goods” lavish on an ever-increasing public reproductions of works of art. This revolution resembles that previously accomplished for the broadcasting of words and ideas, by the invention of printing; we do not yet know if it can be of the same importance in its field.

Broadly speaking, the situation that preceded ours can be summed up as follows: formed by tradition artists worked for a rich or fairly rich clientele, or for the State who commissioned them; their works were periodically made the object of official exhibitions (salons presided over by a committee or inspired by amateurs or connoisseurs), or in the form of private shows, both indeed appealing to the same “élite”—on whom Proust has left us some exemplary pages. The rest of the public was composed for the most part of people who had no access to art, who never entered a museum or a gallery, much less a salon, still less the studio of an artist; in short, for whom art had no existence except some names—Rembrandt, Raphael, Michelangelo—who remained names. Between the “élite” and the no-man's-land, a “fringe” public, made up of those who wanted to have, for reasons of taste, of curiosity, or for other motives, an initiation to art, to have some idea of it, and who went periodically to museums, to exhibitions, or who gathered information by reading. It is noteworthy that school hardly played any part: artistic teaching being most often reduced to “drawing lessons” where one learnt to copy Egyptian or Roman plaster casts, engravings, pictures, in short, to copy a design. As for books, they became confused with the same grisaille of printing and line-drawings, which, indeed, reappeared in the windows of bookshops and even in the town…

When the first snow flutters down onto the roofs and streets of London, Moscow or Zürich, it is “news”—although the same thing happens about the same time every year. The fact that this (usually very transitory) white splendour is news is demonstrated by the fact that the editors of the local papers in these three cities inform their respective readers of it. The readers—or those of them who live in the area—will have usually already noticed the meteorological event for themselves. Those who live elsewhere, and who read the report and look at the pictures of it, will of course not have noticed the fact for themselves. The two groups of readers will pay a very different degree of attention to the news-item, depending on the importance it has for them. But if this first snow affects international air traffic, due to the closing down of one or other airport in the three cities, then it becomes, through its effects, a piece of “news” for the travel experts, and perhaps even the economic experts, of the mass media, and it is accorded national or even international publicity.

The phenomena of fashion are inextricably mixed with an infinite variety of behaviours that challenges simple enumeration. A theory offers itself nonetheless in the form of an explicit description of the structures that support its evolution. Meeting the phenomena of fashion in their most disconcerting characters—their omnipresence, the paradox of an imitative behaviour that serves the prestige of the individual, their changes—we set ourselves to isolate the principles on which it works. Thus, in the course of investigation, we have been put in possession of an explanatory model of which it will be sufficient for us to verify if it regulates the other aspects under which fashion can appear. A model that is simple enough, because we propose to show that one has said everything that the manifestations of fashion can be when one has recognised there a manifestation of sociability, of imitative origin and playful character.

In a previous essay, the authors attempted to define, in phenomenological terms, the artistic and critical attitudes.

The artistic attitude was seen as the attempt to create the image of a total world, which could be enjoyed or viewed in terms of an attitude of everyday life; that is to say, that the created image was so all-encompassing, so total, and so complete, of a concreteness and vividness, such that the viewer could suspend perceptions of all other worlds and respond directly and immediately to the world created as a work of art.

At the termination of the First World War a new social order arose which has been labelled mass society. Mass society gained impetus during and as a result of the Civil War and increased momentum during the First World War.

It was especially in the United States, but also in Great Britain, France, Northern Italy, the Low Countries, Northern European countries and Japan that mass society and its culture made its first appearance. Some of its features have begun to appear in Eastern and Central Europe, and, in an incipient way, in the Asian and African countries.

The relationship between social science and television has been an uncomfortable one. So “conspicuously vulgar,” so “manifestly tempting,” so “clearly a waste of time,” television's “evil effects” have been pondered by social scientists ever since the first antennas were raised on the rooftops of America and Western Europe.

Sheer quantity provides perhaps the leading cause for the concern. Much as uncontrolled births, “the problem of overpopulation,” serves as fulcrum for concern with “underdeveloped” countries and as epitome for the difficulties associated with raising levels of living, so uncontrolled television viewing, the problem of over-viewing, serves as fulcrum for concern with modern societies and as epitome for the difficulties associated with improving styles of life.