Low 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."
Low culture is a derogatory term for some forms of popular culture. The term is often encountered in discourses on the nature of culture. Its opposite is high culture. It has been said by culture theorists that 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 or working class culture can be traced from panem et circenses (bread and circuses) in Roman antiquity, to mass readership starting in the Victorian era (dime novels), music halls in the 19th century, pulp magazines of the 20th century, exploitation films of the second half of the 20th century and video nasties in the 1980s.
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
In film
B-movies - exploitation films - grindhouse films - paracinema - television - video nasties - violent 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
In performing arts
burlesque - circus - peepshow - striptease - vaudeville -
By genre
adventure - "body" genres - carnival - comedy - horror - melodrama - pornography - romance
Baser instincts
hedonism - instinct - escapism
See also
