No Distinction, No Difference

An argument for the relative harmlessness of
popular culture.

I am all for more rational discussions of popular culture and its effects on consumers. It simply is not true that "low" culture lowers us, and claims to that effect are elitist in some precise sense, not to mention ahistorical. Shakespeare was certainly a popular artist; indeed, the notion of the playwright as author had yet to be created until after he died.

Yet this article is typical in simply wanting to assign to works of art the same value as any other consumable good, which is simply the pleasure it gives the consumer. It may be a torturous argument, but I would call this idea "elitist," since it obscures the fact that people can and do make distinctions between works of art, and those distinctions matter. Another painting is not simply another brand of toothpaste. Just because Shakespeare could be appreciated by the groundlings does not mean he was aiming at the lowest common denominator, which is precisely what most consumer goods do. Rather, for art, there is indeed a canon and there are such things distinctions matter, which is why we continue to study aesthetics.

Unfortunately, many proponents of aesthetics and the canon reify both, such that any change is a change for a bad. These are the proponents that Lumby has in mind, the sort that tend to say "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." Yet art is that which defies reification--this is the quality that Derrida has tried, with little success, to import into the study of philosophy--so that any time someone reifies "Art," you know that they have a hidden agenda. There is however tradition, but not again in the way that traditionalists think of it. Techniques, truisms, and indeed mentoring all pass down skills. This is why it is elitist for Media Studies professors to say anything can pass for art. They conceal the amount of work and attention it continues to take to make an impression. By giving young people the idea that anything counts, such elitists are setting them up for a fall. Unfortunately, that was what many people heard when the Beats and the Hippies ruined the sacred truths of New Criticism. To my mind, it is in the interest of cultural workers everywhere to say that work requires work and that tradition matters, even it is only in service of change.