Low culture  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Lowbrow (art movement)

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"".

History

The history of low culture can be traced to panem et circenses (bread and circuses) and Latin profanity in Roman antiquity, to the picaresque novel and genre painting in the Renaissance, to mass audiences of dime novels, erotic photography and music halls in the Victorian era, to pulp magazines exploitation films, video nasties and shock sites of the 20th century.

See also

"body" genres" - bread and circuses - "low" art - lowbrow (American art movement) - working class culture - culture - folk culture - popular culture - low modernism

Related by connotation

artificial - bad taste - basic instinct - camp - cheap - commercial - conventional - common - derivative - entertaining - ephemera - exploitation - formulaic - gratuitous - low budget - lurid - mass - ordinary - pop - popular - proletariat - prurient - sensationalism - scatology - shocking - stereotype - trash - under-the-counter - underground - vulgar

Contrast

"high" culture

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

adventure - "body" genres - carnival - comedy - horror - melodrama - pornography - romance

Baser instincts

Low culture is frequently said to address the baser instincts of hedonism and escapism.

Low culture by region

In search of national stereotypes by way of their exploitation culture.

American exploitation culture is well-known throughout the world, European exploitation culture less so.

• American exploitation
• European exploitation
  • British exploitation
  • French exploitation
  • German exploitation
  • Italian exploitation
• Japanese exploitation

Main themes

sex, drugs, violence, true crime

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.

Exploitation films

early exploitation films, exploitation film

See also

• Mass society
• Kitsch
• Popular culture
• Culture industry
• Bread and circuses
• One-Dimensional Man
• Reality television
• Primitive art
• Lower class
• Lower class
• Prolefeed
• Outsider art
• Lowbrow (art movement)
• Trash culture
• Shock humour
• Human intelligence variation
• Exploitation film
• White trash
• Lowest common denominator