Low culture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Low culture is a derogatory term for some forms of popular culture and working class culture. The term is often encountered in discourses on the nature of culture. Its opposite is high culture. Strictly speaking, both high culture and low culture are subcultures.
Kitsch, slapstick, camp, escapist fiction, popular music, comic books, tattoo art and exploitation films are examples of low culture. It has often been stated that in postmodern times, the boundary between high culture and low culture has blurred. See the 1990s artwork of Jeff Koons for example of appropriation of low art tropes.
Romanticism was one of the first artistic movements to reappraise "low culture", when previously maligned medieval romances started to influence literature and Susan Sontag was one of the first essayists to write about the intersection of high and low art in her 1964 essay "Notes On "Camp"".
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History
The history of low culture can be traced to panem et circenses (bread and circuses) and profanity in Roman antiquity, to the picaresque novel and genre painting in the Renaissance, to mass audiences for penny dreadfuls, erotic photography and music halls in the Victorian era, to pulp magazines exploitation films, video nasties and shock sites in the 20th century.
By medium
In film
B-movies - exploitation films - grindhouse films - paracinema - television - video nasties - violent films
While the term exploitation was initially coined in the 1950s to describe 1930s and 1940s (the classical era of American exploitation film), the practice of exploitative fiction is as old as fiction itself. Areas of interest in this field include grub street hack writing, dime novels and pulp fiction, paperbacks and white slavery films, blaxploitation, Grand Guignol and slasher films.
In print
comics - escapist fiction - dime novels - genre fiction - men's magazines - paraliterature - popular fiction - pulp fiction - yellow journalism
In music
disco - house - music hall - popular music - pop music -
In the visual realm
- advertising - applied arts - caricature - decorative arts - design - graffiti - kitsch
Low art refers to the lesser or minor arts, including the decorative or applied arts, with the assumption that these are low partly because of the poor quality of materials and manufacturing. They are said to be superficial kitsch, catering to popular taste with a couch potato mentality.
In performing arts
burlesque - circus - peepshow - striptease - vaudeville -
By genre
Body genres are the main theatres of low culture: subfields include adventure, carnival, comedy, horror, melodrama, pornography and romance.
Low culture by region
In search of national stereotypes by way of their exploitation culture.
American low culture is well-known throughout the world, European low culture less so. Japanese low culture even less.
Main themes
Baser instincts
Low culture is frequently said to address the baser instincts of hedonism and escapism.
Subthemes
blaxploitation, artsploitation, b-movie, cautionary tale, comics, cult films, "dime novels" and "penny dreadfuls", escapist fiction, erotic horror, fantasy, fantastique, giallo, gore, gothic, grindhouse, horror, mondo films, Nazi exploitation, nunsploitation, pornography, prostitution, pulp, sensationalism, sexploitation, shock, slasher, snuff film, trash, video nasty, violence, white slavery, women in prison, working class culture
Sensationalism
Sensationalism is a manner of being extremely controversial, loud, attention-grabbing, or otherwise sensationalistic.
The term is commonly used in reference to the media. Critics of media bias of all political stripes often charge the media with engaging in sensationalism in their reporting and conduct. That is to say they charge that the media often chooses to report on shocking or attention-grabbing stories, rather than relevant or important ones.
See also
- "Body" genres"
- Bread and circuses
- Culture industry
- Exploitation culture
- Folk culture
- Human intelligence variation
- Kitsch
- Lowbrow (art movement)
- Low art
- Lower class
- Lowest common denominator
- Low modernism
- Mass society
- Off color humour
- One-Dimensional Man
- Outsider art
- Primitive art
- Prolefeed
- Popular culture
- Reality television
- Shock humour
- Toilet humor
- Trash culture
- White trash
Stereotypes by region
- Bogan (Australia and New Zealand)
- Dres (Poland)
- Gopnik (Russia)
- Chav (UK)
- Redneck (United States)
- Flaite (Chile)
Related by connotation
artificial - bad taste - basic instinct - camp - cheap - commercial - conventional - common - derivative - entertaining - ephemera - exploitation - formulaic - gratuitous - low budget - lurid - the masses - ordinary - pop - popular - proletariat - prurient - sensationalism - scatology - shocking - stereotype - trash - under-the-counter - underground - vulgar
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