High art  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda. (La Joconde), is a 16th century oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and is one of the most famous paintings in the world. It has acquired an iconic status in popular culture. In 1963, pop artist Andy Warhol started making colorful serigraph prints of the Mona Lisa. Warhol thus consecrated her as a modern icon, similar to Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley. At the same time, his use of a stencil process and crude colors implies a criticism of the debasement of aesthetic values in a society of mass production and mass consumption. Today the Mona Lisa is frequently reproduced, finding its way on to everything from carpets to mouse pads.

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Wikipedia Wiktionary Tumblr Wikisource YouTube Shop Featured visual Cenotaph for Newton (1784) by French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée.

High art or fine art is the opposite of popular culture.

Examples of high art

Much of high culture consists of the appreciation of what is sometimes called high art. This term is rather broader than Arnold's definition and besides literature includes music, visual arts, especially painting, and traditional forms of the performing arts, now including some cinema. The decorative arts would not generally be considered high art.

The cultural products most regarded as forming part of high culture are most likely to have been produced during periods of high civilization, for which a large, sophisticated and wealthy urban-based society which provides a coherent & conscious aesthetic framework, and a large-scale milieu of training, and, for the visual arts, sourcing materials and financing work. All this is so that the artist is able, as near as possible, to realize his creative potential with as few as possible practical and technical constraints. Although the Western concept of high culture naturally concentrates on the Graeco-Roman tradition, it would normally be recognised that such conditions existed in other places at other times.