Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 3 Culturalism
this something of the surprise of art as well as the shock of recognition. Such art
has in common with folk art the genuine contact between audience and performer:
but it differs from folk art in that it is an individualised art, the art of the known
performer. The audience as community has come to depend on the performer’s
skills, and on the force of a personal style, to articulate its common values and
interpret its experiences (66).
One problem with their distinction between art and popular art is that it depends
for its clarity on art as ‘surprise’, but this is art as defined in modernist terms. Before the
modernist revolution in art, everything here claimed for popular art could equally have
been claimed for art in general. They make a further distinction to include ‘mass art’.
There is popular art (good and bad), and there is art (good and not so good), and there
is mass art. Mass art is a ‘corrupt’ version of popular art; here they adopt uncritically
the standard criticisms made of mass culture: it is formulaic, escapist, aesthetically
worthless, emotionally unrewarding. Rather than confront the mass culture critique,
they seek to privilege certain of the texts and practices of popular culture and thus
remove them from the condemnation of the critics of mass culture. In order to do this
they introduce a new category – the popular arts. Popular art is mass culture that has
risen above its origins. Unlike ‘average films or pop music [which] are processed mass
art’, popular art is, for example, the ‘best cinema’, the ‘most advanced jazz’ (78). They
claim that, ‘Once the distinction between popular and mass art has been made, we find
we have by-passed the cruder generalizations about “mass culture”, and are faced with
the full range of material offered by the media’ (ibid.).
The main focus of The Popular Arts is on the textual qualities of popular culture.
However, when Hall and Whannel turn to questions of youth culture they find it necessary
to discuss the interaction between text and audience. Moreover, they recognize
that to do full justice to the relationship, they have to include other aspects of teenage
life: ‘work, politics, the relation to the family, social and moral beliefs and so on’ (269).
This of course begs the question why this is not also necessary when other aspects of
popular culture are discussed. Pop music culture – songs, magazines, concerts, festivals,
comics, interviews with pop stars, films, etc. – helps to establish a sense of identity
among youth:
The culture provided by the commercial entertainment market . . . plays a crucial
role. It mirrors attitudes and sentiments which are already there, and at the same
time provides an expressive field and a set of symbols through which these attitudes
can be projected (276).
Moreover, pop songs
reflect adolescent difficulties in dealing with a tangle of emotional and sexual
problems. They invoke the need to experience life directly and intensely. They