December 21 marked an epoch. Psy, the stage name of 34-year-old Park Jae-sang, became the first artist to get 1 billion views on

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问题    December 21 marked an epoch. Psy, the stage name of 34-year-old Park Jae-sang, became the first artist to get 1 billion views on YouTube with Gangnam Style. But global blockbuster hits, in whatever genre, have come to seem a US niche market. It was Michael Jackson’s popularity in the 1980s that started this global style in pop culture. In contrast to, say, The Beaties, who had an unmistakably English style that became globally popular, Jackson’s music, an ingenious collection of disco rhythms and nonsense phrases, didn’t seem to come from any culture.
   Why have Americans so dominated the globalised part of popular culture up till now? The US has little in the way of cultural infrastructure abroad, like Germany’s Goethe Institutes or the British Council. And that should not matter.
   The US has benefited from intangible advantages. It uses the lingua franca, the cultural equivalent of printing a reserve currency. Their home audience may be the pivotal advantage US artists have. As the writer Todd Gitlin put it years ago: "By the time it leaves our shores, US popular culture has been ’ pretested’ in a heterogeneous public—a huge internal market with hybrid tastes and a tradition of juxtaposition and recombining disparate elements, melting them down into a Hollywood melange."
   But you could as easily say "dumbing down" as "melting down" . Culturally speaking, the diverse US audience gives and it takes away. An American artist who wants to appeal to a variety of US cultural communities does so not by mastering the cultures of others but by stripping away those elements of his own that might require explanation. US society is indeed diverse, but for that very reason American popular culture is homogeneous.
   Americans understand this poorly. What the US has is not a national genius but wealth, prestige and glamour. The world is always curious about how wealthy, prestigious and glamorous people dance, fight and fall in love. Obviously, the producers and venture capitalists who drive the entertainment industry will happily turn their focus towards any country that can produce blockbusters.
   But the heart of the problem is elsewhere. Should the US reputation for mismanagement, profligacy and trillion-dollar government deficits continue to grow, non-US corporate executives would at some point ask why they are paying an architect to design a conference room like those in Manhattan. Culture follows wealth, prestige and glamour. As the US share of these declines, the world’s viewers may come to prefer Sleepless in Seoul to Sleepless in Seattle.

Todd Gitlin’s words are cited to illustrate that American artists____.

选项 A、benefit from using the lingua franca
B、profit by their diverse home audience
C、have been put in severe tests
D、are getting dumbed down

答案B

解析 推断题。根据题干定位到第三段第三句。作者指出美国艺术家因其本国观众群而受益匪浅;第四句指出美国文化在走出国门之前,就已经接受过多元文化的考验,已经融合了多种文化元素。所以B项正确。
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