What is the difference between high culture and low/throwaway culture?
Who sets the ideals of what is important and what is not?
'One of the two of three most complicated words in the English language.' - Raymond Williams.
What is popular culture? Popular being another term which is hard to pin down.
Certain expressions of people are dubbed as not being high culture, however all culture is purely an expression of man.
The development of heavy industry began to make clear lines of class separation between the working class and the bourgeois. Before this moment it was the idea that there was a shared culture, in reality the only people who made this culture was the upper classes. The rich who had time to create work due to the lack of need to work in menial labour to make money.
Matthew Arnold (1867) was one of the first to write about 'culture' as a backlash of the working class beginning to blur the lines. He spoke of culture being nothing to do with politics or money, basically anything with an agenda has anything to do with culture. Popular culture was a wrong way to go and we should get back to philosophy, art, literature, ballet and the opera, more to the point the things the ruling classes felt was culture.
Leavisism - F.R Leavis & Q.D Leavis. First elitist to really speak about 'Popular' culture. He spoke about the decay of society due to the popular culture. 'Culture has always been in minority keeping', this basically tells us he believes that only a minority of elitists who 'know' what culture is should set the rules. Leavis thought popular culture is just a form of escapism, of zoning out.
The Frankfurt School was a collective of philosophers were equally as critical on popular culture but from the opposite view point. They believed popular culture maintained social balance. All mass culture is identical, like a factory churning out products. All movies are basically the same with slight changes, the same for music, radio and television.
Adorno - "On Popular Music'. Found popular music bleak and promoted passives in the masses.
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