Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room on one of my favourite subjects, by way of John Carey, one of my favourite nobrow art and literature critics whose The Intellectuals and the Masses was one of the more enlightening reads of 2006:

 

I’m currently reading John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts?, a book designed to provoke all art-lovers into a steaming maelstrom of outrage. …

Carey will ultimately dismiss the distinction between high and low art as impossible to maintain, but I think we can do something better than that with it. First of all we have to stop seeing the categories of high and low as being mutually exclusive. Quite a lot of operas, for instance, will include elements of farce, or romance, or pantomime, just as a television cartoon ostensibly for children, like The Simpsons, is a fantastic example of relentlessly subversive, parodic, allusive elements disguised under a sugary outer coating. So it’s incredibly rare, in my opinion, to come across a pure example of ‘high’ or ‘low’ art. What we get is far more complex and mixed up than that. The way I would distinguish between those high and low elements, is to see ‘low’ or commercial or mass media art as being formulated in order to satisfy the desires and expectations of its audience. Take Mills and Boon/Harlequin romance books, for instance. … The whole point of these books is that they comfort and reassure readers by providing them with exactly what they want. By comparison, we might define those ‘high’ elements of art as the ones that challenge or question our expectations, whether they be about the world we live in, or the way that an artwork ‘ought’ to be put together […]

I like litlove’s analysis of what makes the difference between high and low culture:

• Low art comforts, satisfies and reassures audiences’ expectations
• High art challenges and questions audiences’ expectations

But I disagree with the statement “it’s incredibly rare to come across a pure example of ‘high’ or ‘low’ art.” I believe that the overwhelming majority of cultural artifacts lack this ambiguity, unresolvedness and ambivalence; this simultaneous jarring and soothing I desire so. Coming back to the proposed low art/high art definitions, the keywords are audience and expectations, but also — from the perspective of the author — demanding (of the audience), which reminds me somewhat of Walter Benjamin’s assessment:

The masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. –WAAMR, Walter Benjamin, 1936

The keyword in Benjamin’s quote is demanding:

As I wrote in the introduction of my Literature/literature page:

Literature is a term (­like taste, culture, quality and style) that carries its own value judgement: Literature (with capital L, also called literary fiction) is associated with serious, complex, difficult and demanding works like Modernist literature (e.g. James Joyce) and experimental novels (e.g. Nouveau Roman).

On the other side of the spectrum are popular fiction and genre fiction, which are perceived as easy, accessible and of low literary merit.

Jahsonic.com aims to show that good works can be found in high and low literary genres, and the more interesting works are to be found where high and low intersect (Cervantes, Stephen King, Simenon, Georges Bataille, …). [Oct 2005]

Litlove’s invoking of romantic fiction also reminds me of a recent post by TeachMeTonight who is teaching a romance fiction class and who demonstrates that there is still a divide between literary fiction and genre fiction and thus between low and high culture:

This quarter at DePaul I’m teaching a brand new class on popular romance fiction. … In a curiously appropriate twist, my course competes for students this quarter with another Senior Seminar for majors: a course on James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s as though my colleague Jim and I had agreed to divide the literary world between us, with one course focused on what is perhaps the most highly-regarded novel of the 20th century (indeed, the book voted “best novel of the century” a few years back) and the other devoted to the most popular genre of the 20th century. By some odd coincidence, the students in my course are all women. I guess the boys have better things to do. […]

A final post by cultureby.com which divides cultural critics in those who defend and reject high/low culture:

Be it resolved:

that commercial culture is compromised culture

Pro:

F.R. and Q.D. Leavis
Robert and Helen Lynd
Richard Hoggart
Helmut Minow
John Berger
Christopher Lasch
Neil Postman
Noam Chomsky
Hilton Kramer
Stuart Ewen
Christopher Lasch
Thomas Frank
Benjamin Barber

Contra:

Lloyd Warner
Herbert Gans
John Carey
John Docker
Warren Susman
H.S. Bhabra
Robert Thompson
Tyler Cowen
Charles Paul Freund

See also: culture war – ‘high culture’ – ‘low culture’