High culture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- "Both high and low culture have produced masterpieces and works of mediocrity. It is our task to find beauty in unexpected places." --Sholem Stein
- "One ought to learn anew about cruelty," says Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil; "and open one's eyes. Almost everything that we call 'higher culture' is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty...."
High culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture. In more popular terms, it is the culture of an elite such as the aristocracy or intelligentsia. It is contrasted with the low culture or popular culture of, variously, the less well-educated, barbarians, Philistines, or the masses.
When used without a qualifying adjective, the term culture usually refers to high culture.
Opera, for example, is considered high culture.
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Concept
Although it has a longer history in continental Europe, the term was introduced into English largely with the publication in 1869 of Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, although he most often uses just "culture". Arnold defined culture as "the disinterested endeavour after man's perfection" (preface) and most famously wrote that having culture meant to "know the best that has been said and thought in the world" - a specifically literary definition, also embracing philosophy. Arnold saw high culture as a force for moral and political good, and in various forms this view remains widespread. The term is contrasted with popular culture or mass culture and also with traditional cultures.
T.S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) was an influential work which saw high culture and popular culture as necessary parts of a complete culture. The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart (1957) was an influential work along somewhat the same lines, concerned with the cultural experience of those, like himself, who had come from a working-class background before university. In America, Harold Bloom has taken a more exclusive line in a number of works, as did F.R. Leavis earlier - both, like Arnold, being mainly concerned with literature, and unafraid to champion vociferously the literature of the Western canon.
The economics of high and low culture
As Tyler Cowen points out in In Praise of Commercial Culture, "economic incentives support the split between high and low culture. Capitalism supports product diversity and gives many artists the means to work outside of the popular mainstream. The resulting split between high culture and low culture indicates the sophistication of modernity, not its corruption or disintegration. A world where high and low culture were strongly integrated would be a world that devoted little effort to satisfying minority tastes. Genres that rely heavily on equipment and materials, which I describe as capital-intensive, tend to produce popular art. Genres with low capital costs, which I describe as labor-intensive, tend to produce high art. The movie spectacular with expensive special effects is likely to have a happy ending. The low-budget art film, directed and financed by an iconoclastic auteur, may leave the viewer searching."
High and low are concepts in flux
Although theater is today a highbrow form, this was not so until the nineteenth century. Historian Lawrence Levine articulated Shakespeare's popularity shift this way:
- “By the turn of the [nineteenth] century, Shakespeare had been converted from a popular playwright whose dramas were the property of all those who flocked to see them, into a sacred author who had to be protected from ignorant audiences and overbearing actors threatening the integrity of his creations."
High art
See high art
Promotion of high culture
The term has always been susceptible to attack for elitism, and in response many proponents of the concept devoted great efforts to promoting High Culture among a wider public than the highly-educated bourgeoisie whose natural territory it was supposed to be. There was a drive, beginning in the 19th century, to open museums and concert halls to give the general public access to high culture. Figures such as John Ruskin and Lord Reith of the BBC in Britain, Leon Trotsky and others in Communist Russia, and many others in America and throughout the western world have worked to widen the appeal of elements of High Culture such as Classical music, Art by Old masters and the literary classics.
With the widening of access to university education, the effort spread there, and all aspects of High culture became the objects of academic study, which with the exception of the classics had not often been the case until the late 19th century. University Liberal arts courses still play an important role in the promotion of the concept of High culture, though often now avoiding the term itself.
Especially in Europe, governments have been prepared to subsidize high culture through the state funding of museums, opera and ballet companies, orchestras, cinema, public broadcasting stations such as BBC Radio 3, and in other ways. Organisations such as the Arts Council in Britain, and, in most European countries, whole Ministries administer these programmes. This includes the subsidy of new works by composers, writers and artists. There are also many private philanthropic sources of funding, which are especially important in the US.
Theoreticians
High culture and its relation to mass culture, have been, in different ways, a central concern of much theoretical work in cultural studies, critical theory, media studies and sociology, as well as postmodernism and many strands of Marxist thought. It was especially central to the concerns of Walter Benjamin, whose 1935-6 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction has been highly influential, as has the work of Theodor Adorno.
High culture has also been an important concept in political theory on Nationalism for writers such as Ernest Renan and Ernest Gellner, who saw it as a necessary component of a healthy national identity. Gellner's concept of a high culture was much broader than just the arts; he defined it in Nations and Nationalism (1983) as: "...a literate codified culture which permits context-free communication". This is a distinction between different cultures, rather than within a culture, contrasting high with simpler, agrarian low cultures.
Pierre Bourdieu's book: La Distinction (English translation: Distinction - A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste) (1979) is a study influential in Sociology of another much broader, class based, definition of high culture, or "taste", which includes etiquette, appreciation of fine food and wine, and even military service. This partly reflects a French, or Mediterranean, conception of the term which is different from the more serious-minded Anglo-German concept of Arnold, Benjamin, Leavis or Bloom.
See also
- Fine art
- Highbrow
- Culture
- Mass culture
- Working class culture
- Cultural studies
- Dead white males
- Higher education
See also
- Civilized core
- Cultural studies
- Classical
- High
- Non-high:
Related terms
academic - art - auteurism - authenticity - author - avant-garde - bourgeois - canon - civilization - classic - classical music - connoisseur - contemporary art - creativity - culture - education - elite - erotica - Eurocentrism - fine art - genius - good taste - greatness - hegemony - hierarchy - high art - High Modernism - intellectual - literature - merit - museum - modern art - opera - orginal - quality - rockism - serious - Shakespeare - snob - theatre - theory - value
Compare
"low" culture - nobrow culture
