WHILE Hollywood executives were professing before a Senate committee not long ago to be shocked, shocked, that somehow R-rated slasher movies like ''I Know What You Did Last Summer'' were being test-marketed to 9-year-olds, the news arrived from London that Tracy Emin, the popular British artist, had unveiled ''I've Got It All.''
Ms. Emin has made herself internationally known in art circles in recent years in shows like ''Sensation'' and, most famously, with pithy confessional installations entailing soiled underpants, cigarette butts, empty vodka bottles and used condoms. Her latest work, at London's Saatchi Gallery, includes a big photograph of herself splay-legged, giving birth to a wad of cash -- the currencies, you might note, hailing from the countries where she has had exhibitions.
We'll take a pass on that particular bait to note that among the so-called Young British Artists, Ms. Emin is said to be a favorite with teenagers. This is a new art demographic and the same one, more or less, coveted by films like ''I Know What You Did Last Summer,'' wherein a serial-killing maniac wields a gigantic ice hook.
Vice President Al Gore has used the phrase ''cultural pollution'' in the presidential debates, and on the eve of the presidential election on Tuesday the culture question raised during the campaign hangs in the air: Is civilization really going down the tube?
No. And let's stop repeating this nonsense before we actually come to believe it. Popular culture is getting more and more juvenile, and the serious arts, or what used to be the serious arts, often emulate popular culture, depressingly. But we can be disappointed in our arts without being made coarser as a society. There's a difference. Why as a nation do we periodically presume that society is coarsened by culture? That's the real question. Why does history keep repeating itself like this?
The 1990's were a decade of change, not a particularly great decade for the arts but a period of change. We ought to look clearly at what is new and what is not. Here is a modest, partial attempt.
The change has been partly technological: the Internet, cable television and VCR's changing the way we see, making culture's intake more private, our encounter with offensive art seemingly more invasive and our reaction more alienated. Meanwhile, we have become more prosperous. And movies, like much of the rest of commercial culture and too much high art, are exploring new depths of silliness and crudity, the junk piling higher than ever because we have more money than ever to spend on making and consuming it.
But at the moment we live in blissful, some might even say sanitized, contradiction to the perception that culture has coarsened American life. Affluence multiplies everything now. There are more Jane Austen movies. More art museums. More people going to them.
There may actually be less sex in movies than there has been in 20 years, and it could be argued that the violence, while more graphic, is less real, more comic-bookish. Hit movies have become, if anything, less forthright and more squeamish when it comes to genuine political or social conflict.
We also may expect more of culture than we used to, or at least we want more from it than it can provide. Peace and prosperity, long desired, turn out to be dandy only up to a point. Culture, a vague catchall, makes a ready target for what else we think is missing in life. It is a convenient punching bag for what rising stock prices and crime-free streets do not in the end provide. In the luxury of our booming economy, we have plenty of extra leisure time in which to complain about what culture is failing to do.
The demise of popular culture is anecdotally linked to the deluge of mayhem flicks, gay-bashing jokes in blockbusters like ''Scary Movie,'' onscreen flatulence gags and gross-out humor in bombs like ''Ready to Rumble,'' mass-murder video games like ''Doom,'' bondage dot-com sites, ''Survivor'' and trash-talking television cartoons like ''South Park.'' These pop phenomena have combined with what used to be the boutique category of fine art to include big, noirish paintings of female corpses and dung-adorned collages of the Virgin Mary.
The only surprise of the Senate hearings in September wasn't that Columbia Tristar tried to sell an advertisement on Nickelodeon, the children's network, for ''The Fifth Element,'' a movie involving gun battles and a talk-show host performing cunnilingus on a guest singer. The surprise was that the senators seemed to expect the public to believe that it would really be possible to sequester children from ads for movies like that.
Just walk through tourist-friendly Times Square these days. The huge Disney-affiliated ABC billboard flashes steamy video clips from daytime soaps in front of the teenagers who cluster below MTV's studio windows and line up at the World Wrestling Federation store for Chyna to sign copies of her spread in Playboy. Nobody reasonably expects to keep dry standing in the midst of a deluge.
We are more cynical these days. Bad art and craven art marketers breed disaffected consumers, in a downward spiral. In art galleries and at great public establishments like the newly hip-hop Brooklyn Museum and the Armani-sponsored Guggenheim, commercial fashion and pseudotransgressive button-pushing in emulation of Hollywood trigger our stony indifference. We roll our eyes. No one wants to seem like a rube -- a defensive response, which in the end is self-anesthetizing. Our reaction to pandering and provocation in museums has become something akin to compassion fatigue, to our numbed reaction to seeing too much violence on the network news.
And indifference is willed blindness, which can mute deserved outrage. Arts critics know that one of the purposes of modern art has been to make us uneasy, the arts, unlike battlefields or brokerage houses, being wonderfully benign sites on which to thrash out our different values.
When sensationalism, a cheap effect, substitutes for truly disturbing art seriously presented, we should be deeply bothered. But arts critics, aware of art's punching-bag role, can often be too close to the arts or too defensive of them, and maybe a little too worried about peer pressure, to express disappointment whenever it is felt, in part fearing another ''Bosley 'Bonnie'-Brook,'' as a 1967 headline in Variety put it. Bosley Crowther, the New York Times film critic then, having failed to see the point of ''Bonnie and Clyde,'' wrote that it was just ''another indulgence of a restless and reckless taste, and an embarrassing addition to an excess of violence on the screen.'' Other people recognized the film to be a sign of generational shift, a seismic change attuned to the youth culture in the middle of the Vietnam War. By the end of that year, Mr. Crowther decided to retire.
Generational shift can be especially hard to perceive from the caboose end, which increasingly locates the baby boomers. During the 1960's and 70's, America reflected young boomers' preoccupation with sex and social freedom. In the 80's it was a maturing generation's desire for money and security. Now it's a middle-aged group's inevitable alarm about uncontrollable global change. Baby boomers ceding control to succeeding generations risk confusing lost authority with perceptions of social entropy. Cries of civilization's breakdown have historically been a stand-in for displaced anxieties about other things.
ANXIETY about technological change, for instance. During the 1920's, the proliferation of movie theaters -- which you could call a technological phenomenon like the spread of personal computers, cable television stations and video machines in the 1990's -- provoked a spasm of sociological reports, Senate hearings, speeches from the pulpit and media speculation about the collapse of American cultural standards and the resulting corruption of America's children.
Scientists stuck electrodes to teenagers to try to measure the psychic effects of watching sex and violence in movies, failing to ask whether similar reactions might have been caused by, say, reading dime novels or Walter Scott adventures. Parents feared they couldn't control the new medium by which their children, whose movie intake averaged around two a week, were learning about the world from unscrupulous movie moguls via Rudolph Val entino. Chicago, whose Tribune editorialized several times against the corrupting effects of Valentino, even enacted film censorship laws, pointlessly. A Hollywood executive noted that the city of Al Capone had become the ''nicest, cleanest, most orderly, crimeless city in the world today.''
Each generation has repeated this self-delusional process, usually around election time. In the 50's the scourge was comic books, ruining children's mental health. By the 60's it was television, now in nearly every home. Then at one exquisite moment in 1972, when porn theaters had not yet been made obsolete by the video revolution, the two most popular films in the country were ''The Godfather'' and ''Deep Throat,'' to widespread consternation. The term ''porno chic'' was coined to describe the lines of celebrities, dating couples and suburbanites at places like the grubby World Theater on 49th Street in Manhattan, where ''Deep Throat'' earned millions of dollars in its first few weeks.
''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,'' which you could call the godfather of ''I Know What You Did Last Summer,'' came out two years later. And by the 1980's pop sociologists were warning that boomboxes blasting Run-DMC over the din of rumbling subway cars portended the final ignominious breakdown of civil society, which was around the same time that Slayer's album ''Reign in Blood'' reached the charts with a song serenading Josef Mengele.
Then boomboxes declined, fashionably displaced by the technological revolution of the CD Walkman. Problem solved.
Now it's intrusive cell phones and road rage as social analogues of such evil cultural phenomena as women-hating rap lyrics and foul speech on ''reality-based'' television shows. Altogether they signal our dissolution -- for real this time, the doomsayers insist, never mind the news about plummeting rates of crime, teen pregnancy and divorce. Coarsening culture begets uncivil action, so the knee-jerk argument always goes, which was the underlying point of the Senate hearings last month and in the 1920's. Even so, for good reason senators in the recent hearings stopped short of claiming that violent art causes violent behavior, because by now everyone knows that the facts don't reliably support the rhetoric.
One man's civility is invariably another's hell, of course. Dan Quayle, running for re-election, railed against ''Murphy Brown'' for its lack of ''family values'' but said nothing about the body count in Arnold Schwarzenegger's ''Total Recall.'' In the 1950's, road rage wasn't yet a documented risk on Los Angeles's comparatively unclogged freeways, but blacks had to sit at the back of public buses in the South. And before then, people didn't talk dirty in mixed company, but they would spit on the sidewalk and, if they were polite, into spittoons -- which were everywhere, like the ashtray until it, too, was banished in most public places by a society that one could argue is more, not less, compliant, conformist and docile than it has ever been. When was the last time you saw a ''No Spitting'' sign in a New York subway station? Was it the last time you sat in a subway car plastered with obscene graffiti?
We may be too polite. American disenchantment with negativism of any kind in campaigns this political season, the polls tell us, has caused people to balk at candidates who simply don't seem personable enough, policies aside.
On the culture front, laudably forthright depictions of difficult social issues have diminished, in cautious commercial aversion to causing public offense. I wonder, for example: although Hollywood might still give an R rating to ''Fast Times at Ridgemont High'' (1982) if the movie were to be made today, would the producers be as explicit about teenage abortion?
Here's an odd thought. History, as the sociologist Norbert Elias famously detailed, shows that explicit sex and violence -- talking to little children about sex, exalting people who kill -- have been the norms of Western civilization, Victorianism and its legacy being the exception. One wonders whether we are currently wrestling with what is our natural condition, to which popular culture is rudely returning.
What's not old but unprecedented is how on the technical side we receive images, a factor that may partly affect the impression of moral downward mobility. Films in the 60's and 70's could be incredibly violent (''A Clockwork Orange,'' after some editing, and ''The Wild Bunch'' both got R ratings and provoked outcries about society's terminal moral decline), but people sat together in movie houses to watch them, bracketing the experience from the rest of life.
People still go to movies and concerts in droves. But now they often pop videos into VCR's, flip channels on the remote and log on to the Net, at home, alone. Adults and children. The cultural experience has become more private and isolated, a civilizing challenge, because, except for reading, culture's civilizing power has always had something to do with the fact that people generally gathered together for it.
Visual art remains a partial exception, too, in the sense that most people can't afford to experience it in the privacy of their homes -- but these days it manages to be alienating in its own special ways.
As an art critic, I struggle to parse the difference between a used condom and an old urinal. An 83-year-old urinal. Think about that. Marcel Duchamp acquired his porcelain provocation in 1917 from a plumbing equipment manufacturer on lower Fifth Avenue, signed it R. Mutt and submitted the now infamous ''Fountain'' to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York, from which it was acrimoniously excluded. As he had no doubt expected, the society found the urinal beyond the pale.
''You mean to say if a man sent in horse manure glued to a canvas we would have to accept it?'' asked the artist George Bellow, incredulous.
''I'm afraid we would,'' replied Walter Arensberg, Duchamp's patron and champion, who had shopped with him for ''Fountain.''
How's that for prognostication?
But there is a difference between that urinal and condoms, contextually speaking. ''Fountain,'' in no sense autobiographical, arrived against the backdrop of the tradition of painting and sculpture, its incendiary effect having to do with its challenge to material precedent. It existed, like paintings and sculptures, still separated from the rest of the world within the confines of art, posing a question to art about whether to let the rest of the world in. ''Fountain'' was a urinal, but it was also something else in that situation, an artistic proposition.
The same pertained, more or less, when Warhol painted soup cans. But by now -- the lines between high and low having been virtually erased, the question about letting the world in having long ago been answered affirmatively -- a condom is a condom is a condom. Its value has only to do with the shock level of its confessional message, making it akin to the rapper Eminem's lyrics, and equally ephemeral. When art aspires to the general condition of pop culture (which we ought to lament as a compromise of civilized ambition rather than a sign of society's ruin), then that art, like most pop culture, can expect to have the shelf life of an average rap song.
There's good news. The past suggests that culture tends to be self-correcting in the long run, and counterintuitive in its influence. Robert Sklar, whose classic book, ''Movie-Made America,'' details the 1920's panic about film's corrupting effect, the other day mentioned his daughter to me: ''She was a film editor working on gory movies, and she didn't think twice about them until she became a mother, and now she can't bring herself to get near anything violent.''
I asked him what movies she grew up watching. ''If I recall,'' he said, '' 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' was one of her favorites.''
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