Wednesday, October 01, 2008
The Illusion of Pop
In addressing the question of what distinguishes 'high' and 'pop' culture from each other, one assumes a difference between the two. It's only in this assumption that any answer to the question can take shape.
What if we assume that the difference isn't binary, but spectral, a gradient? Ballet is higher than Broadway, which is higher than the latest Bruce Willis movie. They're all higher than Fox News.
These distinctions are arbitrary. As was said in lecture: cultural 'height' is more a matter of context and class than of any convention on content.
It will be assumed here, for simplification's sake, that the respective 'altitude' of any cultural material is a product of its associations with class and history. The higher the class, the higher the culture. The more historic, the higher the class, the higher the culture.
Before addressing the issue of what, if any, concrete and objective difference might exist between 'high' and 'pop' culture, culture itself must be defined. From the OED: “Refinement of mind, taste, and manners; artistic and intellectual development. Hence: the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.”
What does this definition tell us about altitude? Absolutely nothing. It doesn't even introduce a dimension wherein the stature of one culture might be measured against that of any other. Matters of height in culture are arbitrary. The only thing the OED gives which might be related to the problem of height is the mention of 'refinement'. So let's assume the critics, when they speak of high vs. low, or 'pop' culture, actually speak of its relative 'refinement'. Gasoline is higher than crude oil. So what? The gasoline is the crude oil, minus the plastic, the kerosene, and countless other useful byproducts, the majority of which are integral to our modern socio-industrial infrastructure, which is what allows us to own cars to put gasoline into in the first place. All differentiation between high and pop is nothing but a trompe-l'œil.
A trick of perspective:
On the one hand, a middle aged beer swilling high school drop out sits chain smoking cigarettes on his tattered paisley couch watching Fox News because he has nothing better to do. His gut hangs from his stained wife-beater shirt. There's a print of dogs playing poker on the wall behind him. Here Fox News is 'popular culture', which is the economic culture of mass simulation, the default culture.
A famous artist paints a picture of the above scene. Hangs it in a Yorkville gallery. Sells it for $25 000. Where does this value come from? Perspective.
Moreover, what would $25 000 do to transform the 'low' life of the painting's subject? Give him the money. He buys a tailored suit, a leather couch, has the room renovated. He drinks Lagavulin and replaces his cigarettes with Cohibas, replaces poker dogs with an expensive mirror. He has upgraded to 60 Minutes. Who will paint him now? He will buy a painting of someone else.
On the other hand, an esteemed cultural analyst sits in his antique chair by the fire in his study at his ancestral home in the Kentish countryside. His Oxford PhD stares at him from a mahogany mantle. He too is watching Fox News, on satellite; he is reflecting on it as a comment on contemporary American culture. He knows that its content is manufactured to meet the demands of a ravenous economy. He pays more attention to the media than to its content. It could be said that, in this context, Fox News is high culture. It is the economic art of Corporation, 'high' as the satellite broadcasting it.
What's the difference between high and pop? It's the difference between what we call art and what we don't - an arbitrary difference. What's accepted by the mind as circumstantial, mundane or practical is not art. What's consciously beheld as art is art. So we're left with what's art and what's not. Every person organizes every perceived object in the world, including the world itself, into one of these two categories. But these organizations are dynamic, dependent entirely on the time, place and inclination of the subject. Art is a subjective matter.
So there's an artistic mode of perception. Though any object may be placed into this mode and perceived as art, there are many things we, by cultural default, place outside. These are usually the things we're most familiar with, the utensils and paraphernalia of everyday life: toys, buildings, landscapes, dinnerware, furniture, appliances, sidewalks, textbooks, conversations. The mass-media we consume is valued mainly for convenience and practicality. At the button's push or switch's flick we're thrust into the psychologically engineered pleasure of modern entertainment, the irresistible escape of effortless, immediate, streamlined stimulation.
Another more important and subtler difference: art is slow; non-art is fast.
We move into slow time when we look upon a thing as art. We move into the time and space of the object. We swim in slow time, are suspended in a solution of the object's meaning. Our imagination makes an eternity of a brief encounter. We let the object change us. We incorporate it into ourselves and are moved.
We move into fast time when we look upon nothing as art. Fast time is forgotten as soon as it is passed. Time without art is slippery and ephemeral. We can't put our finger on it. It rushes us happily to the grave. It is the bowl of the goldfish, the hamster's hollow plastic ball. We are incorporated by it.
For our purposes here slow and fast time refer to the effect indicated by the statement “time flies when you're having fun,” though for our purposes we might rephrase this as 'time flies when perception is devoid of art'. Also, time that is perceived at a moment as slow because we are bored or 'watching a pot boil' is actually fast in these terms because, like dreamless sleep, as soon as it's passed it is forgotten. Its impact on the life view of the subject is negligible when compared to the breathtaking impressions that are characteristic of experience in slow time.
There is no difference between 'high' and 'pop' culture. In fact, the term 'pop' doesn't name a thing, it renames a thing. It renames that which was not art as art. It recategorizes an object. When we call something 'pop culture' we act upon it, so to move it from fast time into slow time, so to think on it as art and open ourselves to new ways of understanding it.
'Pop' isn't a type of culture, it's a semiotic device for reprogramming our perception of any thing. Let's hope this and other devices such as 'mass', 'folk' and 'indigenous', over time, transform global culture into one in which all things are seen as art, a culture with an undifferentiated perception which will gradually move into near permanent and complete slow time. This would be, in effect, a social equilibration in response to the postmodern phenomena of over-stimulation and overabundance of mass produced objects which don't fit our cultural conventions on art. As culture accelerates to keep pace with technology and the corporate empire's tireless demand for profit we are left hard pressed to find slow time anywhere save the refuge offered by 'high' cultural institutions. We must get slow time wherever we can. We must experience life itself as art in order to experience art at all outside of museums and galleries. We're starved for it as we realize that it's everywhere we look, if only we can slow down to see.
# posted by Ryan @ 10:55 PM 
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youre saying something interesting about postmodernism: even as the real is transformed into the hyperreal (the mundane becoming pop art), it becomes associated with a deeper reality of the mind (pop art becomes high art), which subsequently bleeds into reality itself (all art becomes mundane, thus pop art). perhaps this suggests that the simulacra of pop art is a black hole, which either destroys culture entirely; or-- faint hope-- propels us into a parallel universe.
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