Tattoo and Culture
The movement of tattooing into the realm of popular culture displays certain features of the contemporary culture industry and reveals how fad-like phenomena emerge. Culture producers, beset by the problem of “commercial uncertainty” (that is, what popular cultural products will or will not be successful [see Sanders, 1990]), are constantly on the lookout for new materials with potential commercial appeal. Typically, the producers keep an eye on the interests, activities, and appearance of those outside the boundaries of social power. The tastes and entertainment and material interests of minorities, teenagers, disaffected urban residents, and other “outsiders” are filched by the culture industry, cleaned up and homogenized, avidly promoted as the latest thing, and sold to the larger consumer market. In short, the major source of innovation in popular culture is in the materials and activities of the relatively poor and powerless; innovation flows up the stream of power.
This process has impelled the movement of tattooing into popular culture. Beginning with the “tattoo renaissance” of the 1960s (discussed in Chapter 1), musicians, movie actors, and other entertainment figures admired and followed by young people started acquiring and displaying tattoos. Similarly, sports figures—typically from minority and/or impoverished backgrounds—were tattooed.
Despite the fact that most of the tattoos displayed by entertainers and (especially) athletes look as if they were done by eight-yearolds with magic markers, the fact that admired public figures were tattooed gave tattooing a certain popular cultural cachet.
While exposure by key figures in the mediated popular culture is an important factor in the rise and dissemination of cultural interests and products, cultural innovation and the consumption of particular materials also derive from people’s immediate social networks and contacts. As we see in Chapter 2, an important factor in people’s decisions to get tattooed is that their friends or family members sport tattoos. Understandably then, as more people are tattooed, more people have contact with those who are tattooed, and more people see it as reasonable or desirable to acquire a tattoo. Cultural popularity is a form of contagion.
As tattooing has inserted itself into mainstream popular culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has been thematically assimilated into a variety of media materials.
Go to Body Tattoo and Tattoo Body Ink
This process has impelled the movement of tattooing into popular culture. Beginning with the “tattoo renaissance” of the 1960s (discussed in Chapter 1), musicians, movie actors, and other entertainment figures admired and followed by young people started acquiring and displaying tattoos. Similarly, sports figures—typically from minority and/or impoverished backgrounds—were tattooed.
Despite the fact that most of the tattoos displayed by entertainers and (especially) athletes look as if they were done by eight-yearolds with magic markers, the fact that admired public figures were tattooed gave tattooing a certain popular cultural cachet.
While exposure by key figures in the mediated popular culture is an important factor in the rise and dissemination of cultural interests and products, cultural innovation and the consumption of particular materials also derive from people’s immediate social networks and contacts. As we see in Chapter 2, an important factor in people’s decisions to get tattooed is that their friends or family members sport tattoos. Understandably then, as more people are tattooed, more people have contact with those who are tattooed, and more people see it as reasonable or desirable to acquire a tattoo. Cultural popularity is a form of contagion.
As tattooing has inserted itself into mainstream popular culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has been thematically assimilated into a variety of media materials.
Go to Body Tattoo and Tattoo Body Ink
