The 1960s Arts and Entertainment: Overview

The 1960s were a decade of political and social turmoil marked by the assassinations of several prominent political leaders, the expansion of the Civil Rights movement, and violent protests against the war in Vietnam. Young people played a leading role in the movements to influence politics and culture. Not surprisingly, the views and lifestyles of young people also had a great influence on the popular arts. There were still countless films, books, and plays that reflected the interests of middle-class adults and contained formulaic characters, predictable story lines, and warm and fuzzy happy endings. But a new breed of cutting-edge films, books, and plays proved to be more than disposable brain candy; they were bold, irreverent, and adventurous. They reflected the cynicism and alienation that characterized the younger generations in the 1960s by depicting characters who challenged or even mocked authority.

The characters depicted in these new works included such unconventional heroes, as a spunky mental patient who is saner than the oppressive authority figures who control his fate (in Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest); a pair of motorcyclists who set out in search of America and find only racism and violence (in the movie Easy Rider); a college-educated young man who looks at his elders and sees only artificial values and hypocrisy (in the film The Graduate); a band of hippietypes who strip off their clothes to celebrate the dawning of a liberated age they called the Age of Aquarius (in the stage play Hair); and a World War II-era aviator who yearns for peace but is caught in a frustrating, illogical paradox (in Joseph Heller's novel, Catch 22).

Even television, by now the most mainstream of all media, occasionally emitted bursts of creativity while appealing directly to the sensibilities of the young. But for the most part, much of what viewers saw when they clicked on their sets was bland and unimaginative: lowbrow programs inhabiting what Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow called "a vast wasteland" in a 1961 speech.

Pop Art, the decade's prevailing art movement, took the objects and images of consumer culture and elevated them to the status of art. The designs and logos of commercial packaging became the subject of artists' work, as did stylized images of pop culture icons like Marilyn Monroe. The "new" art both celebrated and critiqued popular culture.

In the motion picture industry, a generation of young filmmakers and stars emerged who produced films that were exciting and innovative, and that appealed to the baby boomers. The Production Code, which for decades had dictated the content of movies, fell by the wayside. The result: films became more graphically violent, dialogue became more raw and realistic, and on-screen nudity was no longer against the rules.

The music favored by the young was loud and liberating, but it also could be soulful and stirring. If at the beginning of the decade such music reflected romantic, idealistic teenaged dreams, by the end it had matured along with its audience and reflected a range of issues, emotions, and experiences, mirroring the growing political consciousness of the younger generations in this decade.

A sampling of names and phrases synonymous with the era include the rock festival Woodstock and the pop artist Andy Warhol; rock music icons The Beatles and The Rolling Stones; Easy Rider actors Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda; and catch phrases like "sock it to me" and, most prophetically, "the times they are a-changin'," the latter from a song by folk rock pioneer Bob Dylan.