THE AGE OF MASS INTELLIGENCE | More Intelligent Life
Russell Southwood is queuing outside his local cinema in south London, listening to his iPod. Hip-hop and jazz, as usual. What is less usual is what he is queuing up for: not a film but a live transmission of this season's opening night from the Royal Opera House. "I like hip-hop and opera," he says. "Not a big deal." That's increasingly true. Every other Saturday, Darren Henley is at the Priestfield football ground cheering on his beloved Gillingham. In the evening, he goes to a concert by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic or the London Symphony Orchestra, because he is also the boss of Classic FM, a radio station that sponsors those orchestras. Cultural incongruities are popping up everywhere. When the Guardian, which sponsors the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, picked ten visitors to interview, one turned out to be a check-out clerk at Tesco who saved all his money during the year so he could go to the festival for his holiday. He was far from the most unlikely visitor who might have been found. High-ranking officers from the SAS (Special Air Service), Britain's crack covert-operations regiment--who have to remain anonymous--have been known to spend their holidays each year travelling from their base at Hereford to Hay for lectures on Wordsworth and Darwin. The sharpest of all these cultural contrasts, though, was the one taking place at the Royal Opera House itself the night Russell Southwood was queuing. Every seat had been taken not by the furs-and-cufflinks brigade but by readers of the Sun, a newspaper not noted for its opera coverage. Amid huffing and puffing from connoisseurs, 2,200 readers of Britain's biggest-selling daily, accompanied by a trio of page-three girls (modestly attired), descended on the house of Handel and Callas for Mozart's "Don Giovanni". The paper celebrated with an inch-high headline: "Well Don, my Sun". In most rich countries, the old distinction between high and popular culture is breaking down. Isolated examples of this have been seen for a long time. In the 1960s Karlheinz Stockhausen, a doyen of avant-garde music, appeared on the cover of the Beatles' "Sgt Pepper". In the 1990s the Three Tenors found a mass audience for Puccini. But what used to be a characteristic of individuals or particular occasions is now becoming the defining feature of the whole culture. Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. Not all these activities count as mind-stretching, of course. Some are downright fluffy. But, says Donna Renney, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Festivals, audiences increasingly want "the buzz you get from working that little bit harder". This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. "When people talk and write about culture," says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show "This American Life", "it's apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There's an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us."
Russell Southwood is queuing outside his local cinema in south London, listening to his iPod. Hip-hop and jazz, as usual. What is less usual is what he is queuing up for: not a film but a live transmission of this season's opening night from the Royal Opera House. "I like hip-hop and opera," he says. "Not a big deal."
That's increasingly true. Every other Saturday, Darren Henley is at the Priestfield football ground cheering on his beloved Gillingham. In the evening, he goes to a concert by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic or the London Symphony Orchestra, because he is also the boss of Classic FM, a radio station that sponsors those orchestras.
Cultural incongruities are popping up everywhere. When the Guardian, which sponsors the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, picked ten visitors to interview, one turned out to be a check-out clerk at Tesco who saved all his money during the year so he could go to the festival for his holiday. He was far from the most unlikely visitor who might have been found. High-ranking officers from the SAS (Special Air Service), Britain's crack covert-operations regiment--who have to remain anonymous--have been known to spend their holidays each year travelling from their base at Hereford to Hay for lectures on Wordsworth and Darwin.
The sharpest of all these cultural contrasts, though, was the one taking place at the Royal Opera House itself the night Russell Southwood was queuing. Every seat had been taken not by the furs-and-cufflinks brigade but by readers of the Sun, a newspaper not noted for its opera coverage. Amid huffing and puffing from connoisseurs, 2,200 readers of Britain's biggest-selling daily, accompanied by a trio of page-three girls (modestly attired), descended on the house of Handel and Callas for Mozart's "Don Giovanni". The paper celebrated with an inch-high headline: "Well Don, my Sun".
In most rich countries, the old distinction between high and popular culture is breaking down. Isolated examples of this have been seen for a long time. In the 1960s Karlheinz Stockhausen, a doyen of avant-garde music, appeared on the cover of the Beatles' "Sgt Pepper". In the 1990s the Three Tenors found a mass audience for Puccini. But what used to be a characteristic of individuals or particular occasions is now becoming the defining feature of the whole culture.
Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. Not all these activities count as mind-stretching, of course. Some are downright fluffy. But, says Donna Renney, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Festivals, audiences increasingly want "the buzz you get from working that little bit harder". This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. "When people talk and write about culture," says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show "This American Life", "it's apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There's an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us."
There's a number of holes in the article, but I think there's an interesting core, in that all that educating people we've been doing since WW2, but particularly since the 60s has changed some landscapes.
An interesting book on "cultural dissonance" is that of Bernard Lahire, La culture des individus, which shows that most individuals definitely don't fall within well defined "low brow" and "high brow" categories, but rather fall somewhere in between, depending on the class they started in, but also who they met, whether they are trying to climb the social hierarchy, and their own tastes... Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
It's also worth noting that just because something was popular in the past (Opera, Dumas, Hugo) does not mean that it falls automatically within popular literacy of the present day.
i.e. As you note below, many of the conventions surrounding "high art" were late Victorian vanity inventions. However, they were invented and they did change patterns of consumption.
To run this back to the music thread for a moment, this matters because the story of changes in music consumption is more than just the technology, in fact, given certain effects of the technology the social markers are a more powerful explanation of certain trends.
Finally, to add to the bit about politics that nanne pointed up, the growth of literature festivals is not an innovation, but it is a growth and it does imply a change in the social role of the literature involved, maybe not compared to 150 years ago, but compared to 50 years ago. And that too, is potentially important.
Where social change appears to happen slowly, channels are chosen that 'speed up' insight - like time lapse - and conversely, where change appears rapid, 'slo-mo' channels are chosen. You can't be me, I'm taken
Also, are we so sure that the changes in artistic consumptions in the last century are that deep ? My grand father in the 30's would go to the Opera and to see a popular singer like Damia ; Sartre loved westerns and I'm sure he wasn't the only one. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
In this form it continues, in spite of all democratization and popularization, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The "high culture" in which this alienation is celebrated has its own rites and its own style. The salon, the concert, opera. theater are designed to create and invoke another dimension of reality. Their attendance requires festive-like preparation; they cut off and transcend everyday experience. Now this essential gap between the arts and the order of the day, kept open in the artistic alienation, is progressively closed by the advancing technological society. And with its closing, the Great Refusal is in turn refused; the .other dimension" is absorbed into the prevailing state of affairs. The works of alienation are themselves incorporated into this society and circulate as part and parcel of the equipment which adorns and psychoanalyzes the prevailing state of affairs. Thus they become commercials - they sell, comfort, or excite. The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. The intent and function of these works have thus fundamentally changed. If they once stood in contradiction to the status quo, this contradiction is now flattened out.
In this form it continues, in spite of all democratization and popularization, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The "high culture" in which this alienation is celebrated has its own rites and its own style. The salon, the concert, opera. theater are designed to create and invoke another dimension of reality. Their attendance requires festive-like preparation; they cut off and transcend everyday experience.
Now this essential gap between the arts and the order of the day, kept open in the artistic alienation, is progressively closed by the advancing technological society. And with its closing, the Great Refusal is in turn refused; the .other dimension" is absorbed into the prevailing state of affairs. The works of alienation are themselves incorporated into this society and circulate as part and parcel of the equipment which adorns and psychoanalyzes the prevailing state of affairs. Thus they become commercials - they sell, comfort, or excite.
The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. The intent and function of these works have thus fundamentally changed. If they once stood in contradiction to the status quo, this contradiction is now flattened out.
This has got to be the best quote from the intelligent life piece:
An alternative explanation for the growth of mass intelligence comes from Peter Florence of the Hay Festival. Forty or 50 years ago, he argues, the public appetite for debate and intellectual curiosity was partly met by politics.
