∆ Gaining culture, process of intellectual, spiritual & aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time
∆ A particular way of lie/ way of living - certain values, ways of thinking about things (elite culture, working class, sub cultures)
∆ Can be used to describe a cannon of important art works, or works of literature etc. - shakespeare, daVinchi, beethoven. Who decides the significance of these people?
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BASE
forces of production - materials, tools, workers, skills, etc.
relations of production - employer/employee, class, master/slave, etc
SUPERSTRUCTURE
social institutions - legal, political, cultural
forms of consciousness - ideology *
Culture emerges from the base, and legitimises.
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If we start to think about popular culture instead of culture, it becomes very different
4 definitions of ‘popular’
∆Well liked by many people - for example Dr.Who
∆Inferior kinds of work - popular culture is somehow a lesser or inferior form of real/high culture - Fine arts/opera/poetry. works that aspire to be important?
∆Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people - element of elitism
∆Culture actually made by the people themselves - Made by the people for the people
The left is high culture, makes you question god and life itself, very epic, contemplating relationships with universe and nature.
Right is popular culture, why couldn't it provoke the same questions and thought provoking ideas?
•Popular Press vs Quality Press - Popular newspapers/High class paper
•Popular Cinema vs Art Cinema
•Popular Entertainment vs Art Culture
Whats the difference? The latter is always aimed at the top percentage of society whereas the popular side reaches out the the majority of the population.
Top left Belfast mural (big culture of painting political images on the side of houses/walls)
Interesting thing about this exhibition, walking round laughing, what am i laughing at? We laugh because the things are pretty crap/poor attempts at art and design? Why are we making those judgements, why do we think we could do better? We do because we are in a mind set where we think we believe what is aesthetically right or wrong.
High brow People going round looking at murals, laughing because they feel high class, however the people painting the murals have no understanding of fine art, many learnt to paint in prison. Class judgement taking place because it isn't how they perceive art to be.
Popular culture in high culture.
Graffiti - from the Bronx to banksy, a piece of wall packaged and sold in a gallery, where before it would have sat on a street going unnoticed.
Prior to modernity and mass industrialisation, society had a common culture, on top of this there was a tiny stream of high culture for the rich, but still fed into popular culture slightly. This changes when industrialisation and urbanisation takes place. People are condensed, working class in factories, in mass, clearly separated from the bourgeoisie - working class moving into slums wheres as the high classes move to the nicer areas of the city// generally the nice areas of Leeds headigly hydepark - where the smoke from factories wouldn't go, where the bourgeoisie would live.
They found their own forms of music in their own pubs, own forms of literature, we started to see the beginning a new working class culture very different from the ruling class'
At this time the first workers movement emerges - campaign for working class to vote towards politics. Massing these people together gave them a class consciousness, they started to gain their own beliefs of how they should live, first forms of cultural studies start to emerge...
The first thing he tried to do here was define what culture is, its about trying to find out truths, beauty in the world, whats the best painting etc...
Culture is...
∆ ‘the best that has been thought & said in the world’
∆ Study of perfection
∆ Attained through disinterested reading, writing thinking
∆ The pursuit of culture
∆ Seeks ‘to minister the diseased spirit of our time' - the opposite to culture - anarchy (the working class culture ' the raw and uncultivated masses') - If we let them learn our culture they will develop, if we let them have their own it will be anarchy.
These theories develop then the upper class cultures get threatened, then we get these theorists who start to then document and state reasons why the ruling class culture is better - legitimising the working class and mock the working class culture.
Most people talk about popular culture in this way - for Leavis, throughout the 21st century, we have seen a gradual dumbing down of culture (he had a perfect cultural point)
'Culture has always been in minority keeping' - Culture has always been in the hands of the very few ruling class.
Popular novels offer cheap emotional appeals, weak imitations of actual life, opposed to the opera. sentiment- causes maladjustment in actual life. Hollywood films are ‘largely masturbatory’.
The high brow culture makes you think about the world, however popular culture is just a distraction from the real world?!
Snobbery with which people dismiss popular culture, ie the X Factor, stems from this elitist theory that Leavis spoke of.
That was whagwan in England
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The popular culture that was around in Germany was in abundance in America, Hollywood, promotion, consumer culture. For people analysing capitalism, it was the perfect place to be.
Frankfurt School :
Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer -For them, in America, popular culture was mass produced
Reinterpreted Marx, for the 20th century – era of “late capitalism”
Defined “The Culture Industry” : 2 main products – homogeneity & predictability
Films work on formulas that people enjoy, often trying to add certain
“All mass culture is identical” : ‘As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished or forgotten’.
‘Movies and radio need no longer to pretend to be art. The truth, that they are just business, is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. ... The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. ... The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle. ... film, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part ... all mass culture is identical.’ -Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,1944
Art has turned into a business as a result of capitalism, all we have left is a load of manufactured repetitive rubbish, lost its cultural ethos. Start thinking all in the same way, confirming the status quo, not changing it, looking at the world as set and conformed.
Frankfurt School: They were worried that the working class would overgrow the high brow, they believe popular culture de-politicises people, cements them into this set class system. - If everything on the TV is showbiz and not politics and the world, people are going to stop thinking about anything to do with the world around them/politics.
If all we watch this kind of hollayoaks on TV, where the women are looked as sex objects, whilst supposed to be studying at university, it makes the youth of today believe this is okay to be treated in such a way at uni. Students 10/15 years ago would all be plastered with Che Guevara imagery, eventually loosing its iconography as a revolutionary character, just being popular and cool. - Big bro & X Factor - Being judged by the 'tastemakers'.
All popular music is standardised, its all the same, all works around the same beats, if you like this certain band then you will like the next certain band as it works to the same appealing formula. The less we think about the world, the more we are locked into our position. Listening to such music makes you passive and makes you adjust your behaviour in various ways, he says that dance music with insistent rhythm is a kin to modern conditions of production, a kin to the idea of following orders, slave to the beat- mindlessly dancing to the rhythm of their own oppression.
Behind this slaughtering of mass culture, we have an idea that there is a real culture that is about individual creation, imagination, arises possibilities, makes you active/think when you embrace it. Individual and independent, opposing the mass produced popular culture.
Aldorno says as soon as anything becomes popular it is lost forever, his good friend Walter Benjamin has a slightly different take on it, the way in which techniques of mass production change the status of mass production - What happens when you have a Painting? (Mona Lisa) whats happens when you can re-produce it over and over again, what happens to its value? its cultural importance? Everyone knows about it, but nothing of it, just that it is a masterpiece.
Previously have to go to Le Louvre in Paris just to see it, what that does is you meet the work, the work is the one in power, you play by the galleries rules. When such artwork is reproduced, that artwork comes to you, in your environment, a big challenge to the high brow culture, challenging and threatening the original. Technology allows us to re-create culture and gives us the opportunity to challenge high culture at the dismay of the high classes.
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