What is Culture?
"One of the two most complicated words in the English Language"
Intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a society
Base: Forces of production - materials tools etc.
Relations of production - employer / employee
Superstructure: Social Institutions - Legal, politica, cultural
Culture is a direct product of our society, Capitalism produces capitalist culture.
Definitions of popular:
well liked, inferior kinds of work, work deliberately setting out to win favour - populism, culture made by people themselves.
What is popular culture and high - snobby culture:
Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane: questioning why more common things done by people aren't classed as culture:
Culture stolen by Popular culture:
There is a distinct divide between culture and pop culture
1900's: heavy industrialisation, process of urbanisation and a growth of the city, development of industrial capitalism. This brought about clear class divides, it is clear who are the workers and who are the bosses.
Prior to this there was a shared common culture, this culture was produced by the rich. In response to this illusion of a shared culture, the working class made there own culture for themselves.
New forms of music and literature.
This brings about a backlash by the people that used to define culture- Matthew Arnold writes 'Culture & Anarchy' to put a label on culture.
- Study of perfection
- Attained through disinterested reading, writing and thinking.
- Culture is beautiful and everyone should read poetry, go to the opera etc.
- And that the world would be better if everybody liked this
- This makes a clear divide between high and low culture.
Leavis- wants culture to return to the high, upper class, elite
On low/ mass culture:
‘This form of compensation… is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends, not to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habitutaing him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all’
Frankfurt school:
Defined the culture industry as homogeneity and predictability
-lack of creativity
-similar to mass produced products
-Film industry churns out the same product over and over
People are fed the same old stuff that is sold as something new and different
Marcuse says that this lack of diversity reduces peoples ability to develop individuality.
Culture Industy:
Churning out cultural commodities:
X Factor etc.
radical ideas about changing the world are reduced to a neutral acceptation of culture
Adorno 'On Popular Music'
All pop culture is rubbish, it programs us and tells us what to like.
- Standardisation
- Social cement- gluing the system together
The masses collectively decide what is good and bad within culture, whereas in the art world it is decided by an elite group of tastemakers.
Cultural movements start off as anarchy and revolution but most often end up as common pop culture and is bought and consumed mindlessly.
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