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The medium's own most distinctive format bears out a theory of its first prophet, Marshall McLuhan. TV discovered that on the whole, amid all its sitcoms and music and dramas, the most entertaining, the most amusing and sometimes the most gripping thing it can show us is people sitting and talking to one another, and to us. McLuhan argued that speech is the richest form of human communication because it involves several of the senses--sight, sound, touch, etc.--and that speech on TV is the nearest equivalent yet to the face-to-face variety. Hence the ubiquitous talk show. Hence hosts with an uncanny ability to gaze into the camera and connect emotionally with viewers. And hence our feeling that we know Johnny Carson or Oprah Winfrey as we know a friend or a family member.
It's no accident that we tend to locate the defining artistic moments of recent decades in TV and other popular media, whereas in earlier decades we found them in, say, literature or painting. This stems from the other convulsion the century had in store for the arts in addition to World War I. (Oddly, it wasn't World War II. That conflict's primary impact came from the waves of European artists who fled Nazism for the U.S., enriching the country's homegrown arts and shifting the center of gravity in such fields as painting and classical music.)
The second great upheaval was the 1960s. Again, a rupture opened with the past; received standards and values were under siege, this time in the ferment of civil rights, the sexual revolution and Vietnam. In the arts the rumbling had started in the '50s, when Elvis Presley got everybody all shook up, when Jack Kerouac took to the road and Allen Ginsberg began to howl. In 1969, in a muddy field in New York's Catskill Mountains, more than 400,000 of their spiritual heirs gathered at the Woodstock Festival to stake their claim as a new generation and a new social and political force, complete with a language of their own--rock music.
From then on, youth and pop culture were in the ascendant. The rock sensibility permeated the other arts--painting, film, even TV. Blacks, women and others who had been jostling on the cultural fringe increasingly moved toward center stage.
And what about the heirs of Joyce and Stravinsky? Still doing brilliant work from time to time, to be sure. But broadly speaking, the energies of high modernism had played themselves out, and the ironic, self-conscious borrowings of postmodernism did not advance the cause much. Literature, the theater, classical music lost the authority to set the cultural agenda. Today the influence, the action, the buzz is all pop.