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Culture Lust is a blog about the latest ideas stirring in the creative world, hosted by Angela Carone. As arts and culture producer for KPBS Radio's These Days, she's constantly reading, watching, hearing and evaluating the books, movies, music, articles, performers, plays, and cultural phenomena that cross her desk.
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From High to Mid to Low Culture: Is There a Difference?
Filed under: Random Gems
I am now in the midst of acclimating to the world again. I'm going slowly, hoping to not get the bends as I move from Comic-Con submersion to street-level life. Culturally, I'm moving from this:
To this:
To this:
A week before Comic-Con, I was at the Shakespeare Festival at the Old Globe. While at Comic-Con, I saw graphic novelist Adrian Tomine, who's literary sensibility is embraced by the New Yorker and who gave a very thoughtful interview recently on NPR's Fresh Air. I also saw Predator and Batman and Wolverine. All of this is to say, my cultural experience tends to be one that merges the high and the low on a daily basis. I always suspected this was true for a lot of people, and that the very lines defining the two were getting blurry. Today in the L.A. Times, reporter Scott Timberg writes a great article on this very phenomenon. He surveys his circle of friends and colleagues and learns that New Yorker music critic Alex Ross likes popcorn movies. Writer Pico Iyer loved Nacho Libre so much he saw it twice.
Timberg also looks at how different forms of media have contributed to or imploded cultural hierarchies. For example, the rise of the television as a common form of entertainment meant that books and literature became high art. Reading became a morally virtuous exercise for the intellectual elite, while television rotted the brains of the masses, so the thinking went. On the other hand, the Internet has challenged high art as an elite exercise and made it accessible. Everyone with a computer can now watch video footage of symphonies and opera companies. And, contemporary musicians are taking classical compositions and sampling them in their own music.
This seems like an appropriate discussion to have on the heels of Comic-Con, a convention that celebrates and promotes the popular arts. Is there a qualitative difference between a Bach concerto and a new HBO drama from Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) about vampires? Are both art? Should one be held in more esteem than the other? These are, of course, timeless questions about aesthetics and society but they never cease to be interesting questions.
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I often had to remind my peers when they uttered the disdainful reply of “comics!!??” when they asked where I was headed as I ran out of the office during the day to that humankind’s first written expression were drawings on cave walls and comic books are merely an extension of that—a hybrid of the most basic forms of written human expression.
Over the weekend, my wife experienced her first Comic Con and was reluctant. But she discovered the graphic novel “Exit Wounds”, the brilliance of “Short Comings” and Lynda Berry’s new tome “What It Is”—which according to my wife, says exaclty what she has been trying to say to her students for years. She will now be bringing comics into the classroom as she understands now how they serve as a bridge to those who are reluctant readers.
Comics are no longer Batman and Superman but can also be literature just as much as that Calvino or Murakami book on my desk is considered literature.
Although I’ll admit it, those slave girl Princess Leia outfits never do get old.
Comic Con brought us Repo! The Genetic Opera which by definition, style and form IS indeed an opera in the same way that Tosca, Rigoletto or Madama Butterfly is an opera. Is it aesthetically similar to Tosca, not by a long shot. But it IS an opera and I for one would love to see it produced with the same sensiblities as Grand Opera (and perhaps there will be a future when I will. The Fly— http://www.theflytheopera.com/—was just turned into an opera).
I used to think that high and low culture were more or less the same except that high culture costs more to experience. Opera (considered high culture now) was the low culture back in the day and people attended to opera to mingle, meet, drink and eat and yes, even mate. But walking around Comic Con and seeing $300 toys I’m not sure that one can make that monetary distinction anymore. So I’ve just rationalized as “Culture”—high, middle or low—it doesn’t matter. All we need to do is experience it and we’re richer because of it.
And because of that I love Opera and Theatre as much as I love Comic Con.
Besides, where else can one find limited edition GI Joe toys (beginning at $20) and original Egon Schiele sketches (beginning at $18,500 for a signed lithograph) ten steps from one another?