Popular Culture

Richard Miles

Aims
Critically define ‘popular culture’
Contrast ideas of ‘culture’ with ‘popular culture’ and ‘mass culture’
Introduce Cultural Studies & Critical Theory
Discuss culture as ideology
Interrogate the social function of popular culture

Keyword definitions - Raymond Williams
culture - ‘One of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’

popular -
well liked and wins the favour of the public

popular press vs quality
popular cinema vs art cinema
popular entertainment vs art culture

Caspar David Friedrich - Monk by the Sea, 1809
Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane Folk Archive, 2005

Matthew Arnold - Culture and Anarchy 1867
defines culture as -
‘the best that has been thought & said in the world’
seeking ‘to minister the diseased spirit of our time’

Collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democracy - anarchy
Popular culture offers addictive forms of ditraction and compensation

Frankfurt School - Critical Theory
Theodore Adorno
Max Horkheimer
Herbert Marcuse
Leo Lowenthal
Walter Benjamin

Adorno and Horkheimer
define culture industry as 2 main products - homogeneity & predictability
- 'all mass culture is identical'
- ‘As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished or forgotten'

Marcuse
popular culture vs affirmative culture

Authentic culture vs Mass culture
authentic - real, individual, imagination, european
current contemporary - hollyoaks, x factor, che guevara t shirts

Williamson - Decoding Advertisements, 1978

Walter Benjamin - The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936

Concluding points
- culture emerges from anxieties about social and cultural tension
- Frankfurt School emerges from Marxist tradition
- ideology masks cultural differences