Pop culture and high culture: a teenage perspective on music, fashion, and body modification

¶ … pop culture and high culture are and how can you relate them?

Say the words 'high culture' and almost immediately the first images that spring to mind are those of Shakespearean acting and opera. We see Twilight as pop culture, but Romeo and Juliet and Carmen as great art. However, when Shakespeare wrote his plays, he wrote for a mass audience, not literary critics. In fact, some of his most enthusiastic fans were 'groundlings,' or people who listened to his plays on the ground seats of the theater. Opera was once considered popular music when it was first produced, even though it is almost always performed in lavish, costly, venues today. Clearly, the original intention of the author is not what makes something 'high' or 'low'-brow culture. However, because so many decades separate us from the vocabulary, stage conventions, and associations of Shakespeare and Bizet, these works are now considered high art because they often must be studied in the classroom to be fully understood when presented on the stage.

From a self-interested student's perspective, the difference between high culture and pop culture is often that high culture is the subject of assignments, while pop culture is what he or she consumes during his or her free time. High culture is what you are 'supposed to like,' while pop culture is what you 'really' like. But even this rule does not always hold true. Many people genuinely prefer to listen to classical music vs. The 'flavor of the month' on the radio. Many of my friends prefer watching an Academy Award-winning film vs. A schlocky, pandering Hollywood blockbuster. And high culture clearly has a popular, visceral power; otherwise films like Star Wars would not be famous for using classical music to command the audience's attention. And how can we explain Andy Warhol using images from pop culture like Marilyn Monroe and Campbell's tomato soup cans in his art? Although Warhol is considered to have founded Pop Art, this movement is considered to be a legitimate 'high' art movement that is hung in galleries. Even in recent memory, music by the Beatles and Rolling Stones is now considered 'classic rock.' The Godfather was a popular film but is now studied in film studies programs by serious, aspiring movie-makers.

The division between popular and high art seems to be more based upon arbitrary cultural decisions than something that can be truly defined. Every definition has an example that disproves the rule. For example, it seems safe to say that high art does comprise works of art that are not designed to have a mass appeal, but is instead mainly designed to create great art. However, even theater, opera, and ballet companies must take into consideration the public's appetite so they are not playing to empty chairs. No matter how good the reviews may be for a book, people eventually have to want to read it for it to be meaningful and for it to have a cultural impact.