Just Looking ...

Hi everyone,

The inspiration for this topic comes from a recent e-mail exchange with a friend. I sent her a link to an article from the Toronto Sun which I had found interesting but as it turns out, on that same day one of her professors happened to speak of the Sun with great disapproval. The class requires students to keep informed with the news via print media but apparently, the Sun fell short of her professor's standards and was excluded from the pool of potential readings. The reason - its reputation for having bikini-clad women on its pages. I must say this came as no shock to me as I have heard similar comments in previous courses of my own.

It was upon reading Fiske's chapter entitled "Understanding Popular Culture" (see pg. 7 in particular) that I began to reflect on this issue of what should be considered real news given the occassional snubbing of certain media by those who consider themselves to be part of the intellectual community. I enjoy reading the Sun's Comment section for the diverse, humorous, and often controversial opinions represented in its columns. So what if the paper chooses to display some risque images? Does that undermine journalistic integrity; are the two things even related? Most importantly, couldn't the use of these images by the Sun and other such publications be seen as a way of resolving and satisfying the contradictory needs that Fiske refers to, that is, of "being socially responsible in content, but popular in form and presentation"? If, as Fiske suggests, the criterion for success lies in the ability to harmonize these "competing relevancies", then the Toronto Sun should be considered very successful indeed or shouldn't it? I'll leave that open for debate!

Prof. Kalmar suggested yesterday that it would be hard to come up with any general criteria that determine whether a text enters pop culture. I think I disagree, because what qualifies something for being a piece of pop culture is not any particular aesthetic standard but just whether it's popular or not. So whatever traits tend to make a piece popular in general are just those traits that qualify it for pop-culturedom.

The only two good-sounding criteria I can imagine are that the text be easily digestible (or it can't spread enough to gain popularity) and rewarding to consume (or nobody would want it to spread anyway). Of course, those are fairly vague on their own, because what people in a given place or time find rewarding and digestible will vary considerably compared to other places and times — but, if I'm right, there are nonetheless some real, empirical constraints on form (however transient and localized) that determine whether or not a text enters pop culture.

High art is the really interesting case, and there I'm almost persuaded, with Prof. Kalmar, that form is virtually irrelevant. Indeed, at least in the Western world, the 20th century seems to have been an exercise in proving form to be irrelevant to whether or not our culture accepts a piece as high art. Not everyone can can their poop and put it in a gallery, however; something outside of the artwork itself is what's valued — something to do with irony, novelty or shock value, and the themes that the artist and critics read into it. So it's not so much a removal of any standards at all (or there'd be a lot of people earning vast sums for their blank canvases and cans of poop), but, perhaps, a dramatic shift from aesthetic standards that judge form to ones that focus entirely on the surrounding practice.