Lecure 4; Critical Positions on the Media and Popular Culture

Lecture 4; Critical Positions on the Media and Popular Culture 11/11/11

• Cultural Studies and Critical Theory
• Critically define ‘popular culture’
• Contrast in ideas of ‘culture’ with ‘popular culture’
•  Interrogate the social function of popular culture

What is Culture?

• ·         A particular way of life
• ·         Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance
• ·         General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society at a particular time

Raymond Williams ‘Keywords’ 1983

Definitions of Popular

•  Well-liked by many
•  Inferior kinds of work
• Work deliberately setting out to win favour with people
• Culture actually made by people themselves for people
• 'Mass’ produced

Inferior or Residual Culture

• Popular Press vs Quality Press
• Popular Cinema vs Art cinema
• Popular Entertainment vs Art Culture

Caspar David Friedrich (1809)‘Monk By the Sea’

Question life and existence, the expanse of the universe.

Jenny Harrison’s ‘Sea and Shy in Watercolours’

Could make you think like Friedrich’s painting, more in-depth, but we don’t. We are informed of what is high and what low culture, what conveys deeper meaning is.

Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane 2005.

‘Folk Archive’, exhibition made by the people for the people.

Belfast City

There is a culture of painting on the side of buildings with political themes and commentary by people who are not necessarily trained artists.

We cannot judge other cultures with our own cultural standards as we are all so different and don’t know cultural histories.

Who decides what is worthy of being in an art gallery and what is not?

What happens when culture of the people/popular culture become sucked into higher culture?

E.g. Graffiti invented in Brooklyn in the 70s. Now has developed into a high/acceptable art form with famous artists such as Banksy, but what makes his graffiti ’high art’?

E.P Thompson 1963, ‘The Making of the English Working Class’

An influx of Urbanisation create emerging class divisions.

Bourgeoisie

Working class and upper class are separated through class divisions. The working class develop their own entertainment and form of culture. They create their own activities and growing class identity. This development becomes a threat to those in control of society, the upper class. This made the working class have the right to vote.

Matthew Arnold (1867) ‘Culture and Anarchy’

This book was written in response to this growing working class culture. Culture polices ‘the raw and uncultivated masses’, anarchy will be created by the rise of the working class. Cultural theories a reaction to this threat.

F.R Leavis and Q.D Leavis wrote books together and were married.

‘Mass Circulation and minority culture’

‘Fiction and the Reading in Public’

‘Culture has always been in minority keeping’

Anxious about the growing working class voice and challenging the upper classes.

Equate popular culture to drugs and attack it, justifying their knowledge and higher culture/importance.

Frankfurt School- Critical Theory

An institution of social research 1923-33.

Research projects into popular culture from a left point of view. It was shut down by the Nazis and had to relocate to New York in 1933 until 1947. After the war it moved back to Frankfurt. New York presented to them the future for Germany and its society; they did not like what they saw. They saw Popular Culture as a sort of car manufacturers; people buying and selling meaningless rubbish. They were confronted with this culture in America of mindless repetition.

‘All Mass Culture is identical’

The products follow convention and are predictable such as in Rom Com films.

Mass Culture and its psychological effect; coding and instructing people on how to think, making people dependant on this culture and products and manipulating their opinion. This culture distracts from real life situations.

Che Guvera; a genuine revolutionary who overthrew capitalism. His image has been mass produced in popular culture by people who don’t know the history or what he did and his importance.

Adorno on popular music

Standardisation

Pseudo-individualism makes you think you are buying something individual although it is mass produced.

Music controls how you dance.