High Culture?

I'm going to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Kevin Holtsberry at Collected Miscellany, who apparently agrees with Anne Applebaum's recent observation (Washington Post) of a "divide" between "high culture" and "low culture," one that has allegedly been growing larger of late. In identifying the possible cause of this divide, Kevin proposes that

Without falling into a blind nostalgia about the past, it is safe to say that middle and even lower class citizens looked to high society and art for inspiration. Those with the means and the leisure time attempted to set a standard for taste and class. Sure this didn't always reflect a true meritocracy and it had its share of problems, but there was a sense of responsibility and a sense of standards. The iconoclasm and egalitarianism of the counter-culture sought to destroy this system. Its inspiration was relativistic and anti-hierarchy. Rules and standards; culture and custom; traditions and mores; these were all oppressive tools the powerful used against the weak. They must be thrown off to achieve freedom.

Everything that's wrong with Kevin's argument is contained in that first sentence. In order: 1) He has fallen not into "blind nostalgia" about the past, but utter fantasy. There's never been--never--such a thing as "high culture" in America, or there has been only in "relativistic" terms: some things might be "higher" than others, but when everything's hugging the ground in the first place, the distance isn't very great. This is not to say there haven't been serious artists, writers, thinkers--there are plenty of them around, even now--but that no one in the rest of the culture ever considered such people, or their work, as particularly important or worthy of recognition. Such figures in American intellectual and cultural history have always worked in isolation and took whatever audience they could find. Later on some of these figures have been "canonized" as great American writers or artists, but this is merely a form of nationalism, and doesn't have much to do with "culture" in the way Kevin wants to use the word. The prevailing American attitude toward "high culture" has always been that it's one of those attributes of "old Europe" that America can do without

Thus, 2) It isn't at all "safe to say that middle and even lower class citizens looked to high society and art for inspiration." Most citizens of these classes have been mostly unaware that such a thing as high art exists, or if they were so aware they had long been instructed to view it as suspicious, a conspiracy against "normal" Americans. Even now, from both the right and the left, high art is assailed as "elitist" or "nihilistic" or just plain sissified. At one time the universities did make a little room for the study of serious art and literature, but, perhaps inevitably, they too succumbed to the general disdain for such stuff long embedded in American culture. Conservatives have taken what's left of this legacy and now use it as a weapon in the culture wars. I'm sorry to say that Kevin seems to have adopted this strategy as well.

3) Surely we can all agree that "high society" and "art" are not the same thing. Perhaps in old Europe the two have been and to some extent still are on speaking terms, but "high society" in America" is "high" because that's where the wealth is, and the only place art has here is as an entry in one's investment portfolio. If by "high society" we mean the fashionable crowd, then art is for this group if anything even less important. It's a bauble, a frill, the latest and the newest, a way to get into the papers. (Getting into the papers is the real core value of American culture.)

Art and literature are the products of hard work and seriousness of purpose, and what's produced frequently enough outrages the denizens of high society and the standard-setters of culture (a large portion of the latter are just baffled by it). However, perhaps this is all to the good. If art and literature in the United States were ever accepted into something called "high culture," this would probably be an indication that they've entered into their death throes.

The Literary Saloon also questions the validity of the high/low distinction, but for reasons somewhat different than the ones I've given.

Comments

[kevin holtsberry]

I am not really interested in the culture wars so much as the battle of ideas. Perhaps that is just semantics, but what I am talking about isn't really connected to mainstream conservative politics so much as the underlying ideas.

I think my terms are perhaps too loose and undefined. Do you really think that at no part in our history did the middle and lower classes aspire to the tastes and style of the upper class? In terms of art and culture, was there not a time when those who lacked a formal education might look to a recognized cannon or standard by which to better themnselves? Was there never a time of some sense of consensus of the difference between literary classics and mere entertainment?

What was the role of the counter-culture movement if not to knock down the percieved consensus about cultural and moral issues?

[Ray]

Thank you for the sensible words. The Crooked Timber gallery has also kicked this one around a bit:
http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001662.html

One hidden assumption you didn't get to is the notion that all arts share the same histories. The "highness" of static visual media is generally determined by investment value whereas the "highness" of literary works is generally determined by academia. That is, as many a twentieth-century bohemian group discovered, some of the painters get rich while all of the poets stay poor. (Newspapers, magazines, and talk shows are where everything becomes "middle," of course.)

Indeed, acknowledgment of any historical process at all is lacking: no acknowledgment, for example, that today's "high art" is usually yesterday's "popular art" -- comically, in the case of opera; tragically, in the case of Melville.

And so on. But it hardly matters how many holes we point out and how many times we do it: these pieces will continue to be published in the future as they have ever since academia, investors, newspapers, magazines, or talk shows began adjudicating. Judges must pretend detachment and authority, and yet they must also sometimes recognize that only ambiguities keep them viable. To us, it's meaningless confusion because it has nothing to do with the works themselves; to them, it's an endlessly fascinating paradox because it has everything to do with how they present the work.

A True-Life Example: The one friend I have who could truly be said to have achieved success in the literary mainstream wanted to write an essay about a brilliant and under-publicized writer associated with small and genre presses. He couldn't find a taker, but while pitching it, a major venue asked him to instead write an essay about (see if this sounds familiar) the conflicts between literary fiction and genre fiction. And because he *is* the friend who has truly achieved success in the literary mainstream, he wrote that essay instead, and it was unnecessary, and it got attention.

There is illustrated the real difference between the "mainstream" and the "genre," between "high" and "low." Because a century from now, no reader who read his novels and her novels without benefit of newspaper archives could possibly find a generic difference between them.

[Dan Green]

Kevin:

If by "upper class" we mean "rich," of course everyone else has aspired to this class. But the upper classes in American have never had much to do with art and culture except in the most superficial way. "Uneducated" people have wanted to better themselves, but few want to participate in "high culture." There may been temporary agreement about what's literature and what's entertainment, but then again how many writers over time have jumped from one to the other in readers' estimation? Twain for example. (See also Ray's remarks.)

As I understand it, the "counterculture" was a revolt against middle-class values, not high culture.

Ray:

My only possible disagreement is that some "low" culture is so low it will never rise again. And unfortunatly a disproportionate amount of attention is sometimes paid precisely to this kind of dreck.

[birnbaum]

I am probably not smart enough to follow these high/low culture debates and thus I only read that piece of Swiss cheese by Anne Applebaum as a metajournalistic excercise (meaning, I wondered how and why it made it into print)

But help me out y'all with a concrete example , does Donald Trump and his, uh, whatever ( I am told that is in a category called "reality TV"') even rise to the level of low culture?

[Sarah]

There's high culture, low culture, and bottom-feeder culture. I vaguely aspire to the first, hang around a lot in the second, and try my hardest to avoid the third except where it amuses me.

The one thing that I will say is different today than in yesteryear is that culture as a whole has become far more fragmented. I won't chalk it up exclusively to the Internet, but there is a large role that plays in it--that people with latent interests could suddenly find a common interest or Special Interest Group (the SIGS of freenet days of yore) and meet with other likeminded souls. Meanwhile, media becomes more obsessed with things of lesser importance, and now it seems that what's deemed "important" applies only to a select few, but far more overtly than ever before.

Think of it this way: a show like "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" was deemed of cultural importance and was all over the media--but it was on a two-bit network and barely got 10 million viewers. But it always seemed more prevalent. Same with "Sex and the City" or "The Sopranos." Really, the vast majority of persons don't watch or don't pay attention to the show itself, but have awareness or knowledge and know the talking points to bring up. I think literature works the same way but obviously, on a much smaller scale.

Ultimately I think society and culture will become more fragmented. No more "upper/middle/lower" classes, just a whole host of overlapping interests, or lack thereof.

[dylan kinnett]

this site doesn't have trackback capabilities :(

in the way of a comment, then, i would like to point to some of my thesis work, particularly the second chapter of the academic portion (i did a creative undergraduate thesis)

I am particularly interested in the high/low art distinction, particularly as it pertains to literature.

read here:

http://www.hypnomedia.com/razors/blog/archives/2003_11_01_archive.html

and here:

http://www.hypnomedia.com/razors/essays/hypertext.htm (scroll down to chapter 2)