Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel: The Popular Arts 53
fundamental categorical difference – a difference of value – between high and popular
culture. Nevertheless, the difference is not necessarily a question of superiority/
inferiority; it is more about different kinds of satisfaction: it is not useful to say that
the music of Cole Porter is inferior to that of Beethoven. The music of Porter and
Beethoven is not of equal value, but Porter was not making an unsuccessful attempt to
create music comparable to Beethoven’s (39).
Not unequal, but of different value, is a very difficult distinction to unload. What it
seems to suggest is that we must judge texts and practices on their own terms: ‘recognise
different aims . . . assess varying achievements with defined limits’ (38). Such a
strategy will open up discrimination to a whole range of cultural activity and prevent
the defensive ghettoization of high against the rest. Although they acknowledge the
‘immense debt’ they owe to the ‘pioneers’ of Leavisism, and accept more or less the
Leavisite view (modified by a reading of William Morris) of the organic culture of
the past, they, nevertheless, in a classic left-Leavisite move, reject the conservatism and
pessimism of Leavisism, and insist, against calls for ‘resistance by an armed and conscious
minority’ to the culture of the present (Q.D. Leavis), that ‘if we wish to re-create
a genuine popular culture we must seek out the points of growth within the society
that now exists’ (39). They claim that by adopting ‘a critical and evaluative attitude’
(46) and an awareness that it is ‘foolish to make large claims for this popular culture’
(40), it is possible ‘to break with the false distinction . . . between the “serious” and the
“popular” and between “entertainment” and “values”’ (47).
This leads Hall and Whannel to what we might call the second part of their thesis:
the necessity to recognize within popular culture a distinct category they call ‘popular
art’. Popular art is not art that has attempted and failed to be ‘real’ art, but art which
operates within the confines of the popular. Using the best of music hall, especially
Marie Lloyd, as an example (but also thinking of the early Charlie Chaplin, The Goon
Show and jazz musicians), they offer this definition:
while retaining much in common with folk art, it became an individual art, existing
within a literate commercial culture. Certain ‘folk’ elements were carried
through, even though the artist replaced the anonymous folk artist, and the ‘style’
was that of the performer rather than a communal style. The relationships here
are more complex – the art is no longer simply created by the people from below
– yet the interaction, by way of the conventions of presentation and feeling, reestablishes
the rapport. Although this art is no longer directly the product of the
‘way of life’ of an ‘organic community’, and is not ‘made by the people’, it is still,
in a manner not applicable to the high arts, a popular art, for the people (59).
According to this argument, good popular culture (‘popular art’) is able to re-establish
the relationship (‘rapport’) between performer and audience that was lost with the
advent of industrialization and urbanization. As they explain:
Popular art . . . is essentially a conventional art which re-states, in an intense form,
values and attitudes already known; which measures and reaffirms, but brings to