It is precisely this equalizing talent that makes kitsch so hard to accept. We see it through irony, for example. It signals the reader with a wink, always aware of itself as in some of the novels by Philip Roth, Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie. Literature has come to embrace the kitsch of comic books, genre literature, young adult fiction. This brings us to the relevance of the geopolitical and cultural context in which kitsch manifests itself.
Till the s, the Arabian Gulf was, with very exceptions, a cultural desert, and its imagery was exclusively associated with bad-taste-gilded fussy interiors. Instead of kitsch we should speak about a shift in our patterns from the traditional West-East axis to explain kitsch as pop culture alive in the North-South axis.
Erwin Olaf, Rouge, Player 1, Courtesy of Erwin Olaf Studio. We will address this topic by starting with some of the participants from Down Under. Art for the elite is not a sustainable option. The adoption of pop art strategies to popularize art is therefore to some extent inevitable and not necessarily reductive. All museums face increasing competition from the entertainment business, and the key issue is how to engage audiences in critical debate within art without surrendering to the lowest common denominator.
They compete with a growing number of events and organizations for a small pool of benefactors and corporate support. Art is an essential collective memory, so the more often it appears the better! Those museums are largely subject to the influence of their funders, who are mostly collectors with particular interests in the museum programs. At the beginning and all through the first half of the 20th century, mass culture was perceived in two different, but equally demeaning ways.
Leftwing theoreticians saw it as something produced from the above , an attempt to passivize subordinate classes. On the other hand, the conservative school of thought saw the mass culture as a vehicle of aesthetic, stylistic and even ethic degradation of their elite culture.
As it became clear that the masses were not passive recipients of the products and practices from the mass culture, but quite engaged consumers and creators that shaped their own cultural world, the field of popular culture became an arena for rebellion against the interests of dominant groups and against their practices of cultural patronizing.
Thus, the attempt to define popular culture necessarily included the understandings of oscillations between the dichotomy control-resistance.
After World War II, different innovations in mass media led to significant cultural and social changes and popular culture began to take new forms and a much wider reach. In a hardly separable flux of influences and inspiration, popular culture shaped and was shaped by everything that was brought by new technologies, new media and the emerging consumer society. The meaning of popular culture began to merge with the practices of every day and by rejecting the cultural oppression coming from the official narratives, the realm of popular began including creators and consumers regardless of their class, gender or race.
The firm division between art, lower and higher culture had blurred , and all these notions became merged into one comprehensive term "culture" , covering fields of society, politics, economy and art that have been previously regarded as separate. Popular culture reflects both everyday life with all its pleasures and limitations and constitutes the public primarily as a creative audience.
During the s and s, the new wave of audience research was employed within communications and cultural studies to explore the way meaning was negotiated and constructed.
Apart from the written language, cultural studies use the concept of text to also designate television programs, films, photographs, and anything else that communicates ideas, values and interests. In this way, texts of cultural studies are comprised of all the meaningful artifacts of culture. The audience analysis emphasized the diversity of responses to a given popular culture artifact through an exploration of active choices, uses, and interpretations made of popular cultural texts.
As a qualitative and ethnographic method , this analysis tries to isolate variables like region, race, ethnicity, age, gender and income and observe the ways in which different social groups construct different meanings for the same text. The audience can be active , constantly filtering or resisting content, or passive , complying and vulnerable. The audience analysis can be traced back to the work done by the British sociologist Stuart Hall and his new proposed model of mass communication. Emphasizing the importance of active interpretation within relevant codes, his model suggested that the same event can be encoded in more than one way, that the message contains more than one possible reading and that the understanding of the message can be a problematic process.
The work of Stuart Hall and the ethnographic turn have significantly contributed to our understanding of the processes of interpretation and important relationships between media texts and the production of identity. The method of textual analysis has been widely applied in humanities and social sciences generally, and it has played an important role in cultural studies. Interpretative and content analysis are two main forms of the textual analysis of popular culture artifacts.
Encompassing semiotics, rhetorical analysis, ideological analysis, and psychoanalytical approaches, among many others, interpretative textual analyses aims to go beyond the surface meanings and explore more implicit societal meaning. On the other hand, content analysis is a more quantitative approach where qualitative data from the text evaluation can be converted into quantitative data that reflects the salient concerns of that particular discourse.
It can be very valuable when linked to qualitative kinds of analysis which are usually somewhat subjective observations.
Professor Jeff Lewis argued that textual study is the most complex and difficult heuristic method that requires both powerful interceptive skills and a subtle conception of politics and context.
Later on, textual analysis within the cultural studies framework evolved towards an emphasis on reception studies increasingly. Broadly, the discourse analysis could be defined as the study of the socially determined utilization of language in any medium and its effects on the way it shapes and instructs the world around us. It is a complex process that analyzes the language beyond the sentence , taking into account all levels of the text and context, as well as the wider cultural background.
The critical discourse analysis is able to provide the understanding, skills, and tools by which we can demonstrate the place of language in the construction, constitution, and regulation of the societal world.
The critical discourse analysis has been examining formal media such as newspapers and oral, written and visual political discourse, but is also applied to the analysis of popular culture texts. The core case of cultural studies is that language does not mirror an independent object world but constructs and constitutes it. Our thinking and our telling of experiences are structured by text-mediated discourses.
Many discussions of popular culture have been structured by considerations of power, class, and gender. The assumptions underlying discourses on popular culture, such as assumptions concerning class and culture, the role of women, or authenticity and cultural doctrine, raise issues that should be examined critically in current discussions of popular culture.
Gender has always been one of the strongest aspects of the human notion of identity. From the old pre-Judeo-Christian ideas of binary gender, of two genders determined by sex which, for one reason or another, are in constant opposition and conflict, to the more contemporary definitions that break the concept into an entire spectrum of identities - it has always been something people strongly felt about.
As such, it has also been an ideal vehicle for a multitude of artists to engage in discussions with the audience via their works. More often than not, how culture is perceived, and how it is created, is based on gender, on the way the artist sees him or herself and feels the world around them and on the way the audience reacts to what they're presented with - each through the lens of their own set of expectations. Having, in a way, been treated as second-rate citizens in many societies, women have only fairly recently about a century or so ago won their rightful place in the art world and given a voice.
Coinciding with, and mostly being a product of the rise of feminism , this has given the movement a powerful outlet for action as well as creativity. A biographical film on Frida Kahlo has made her fascinating body of work known to the masses, while Marina Abramovic became a household name even outside of the art circles after a performance piece inspired by her work appeared on the globally popular TV show Sex and the City.
Such cross-pollination of "high" and popular culture created a full circle, encompassing entertainment, philosophy, the arts, social activism , politics and beyond. Sexuality has always been no less of a hot topic than gender.
Depending on the cultural, religious, and moral climate, it was more or less an allegory in art. For centuries thinly veiled in mythological and allegorical subjects, the depiction of sexual themes became more and more bold, until Toulouse-Lautrec and later Egon Schiele started really taking down the barriers with un-idealized depictions of real-life situations of the more intimate kind.
Further down the line, the roaring s and the hippie movement of the s brought with them two waves of liberation, the latter of which is often touted "the sexual revolution". Fashion , with its idea of the modern, free-thinking flapper, and later science, with the invention of the birth-control pill, both contributed to sex and sexuality being viewed as something to be celebrated, rather than to be ashamed of.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century , in the entertainment world, stars such as Madonna did their share of the work in deconstructing old, patriarchal notions of modesty. The arts may have been leading the way but it was popular or rather mass culture that really tore down most of the barriers. And while today some more radical creative minds still explore sexuality in a very raw manner, the theme seems to have lost some of its appeal due to its omnipresence in the media.
LGBT topics , still a somewhat controversial topic across the globe, are possibly among the most discussed issues of our generation. Both popular culture as well as the more avant-garde sections of the arts mimic this in sync. Of course, homoerotic themes have been around for centuries , albeit under a deep cover of prejudice. Even though some pieces from the late Victorian era would nowadays be considered gay-themed the canvases of Henry Scott Tuke immediately spring to mind , it was only in the late 60s and early 70s , hand in hand with the abovementioned sexual revolution, that the grip began to loosen and themes dealing with different kinds of love and sexuality could be treated publically.
Lesbian art and its subject-matter began to appear in works of artists with a feminist stance and unabashed gay erotica and sometimes pornography was the core of the underground work of Tom of Finland.
Some of the biggest names of 20th-century art were, in fact, gay icons - Andy Warhol , Francis Bacon , performance artist and Lucian Freud 's muse Leigh Bowery, legendary portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz , etc.
Music icons such as David Bowie , Janis Joplin, Michael Jackson, Annie Lennox and many more explored androgyny and ambiguous sexuality both in their public personas and their performance. More recently, in the 21st century, themes dealing with the new ways of looking at and expressing gender along with the increased visibility of transgender individuals are as present in galleries as they are in the tabloid press. On a more grim note, the HIV pandemic has been an ill-looking shadow to the otherwise positive and progressive aspects of the sexual revolution.
It created a mass hysteria in the media and spread fear among the general population. Along with thousands of other lives, the disease took such avant-garde performers as Klaus Nomi and Leigh Bowery, as well as one of the biggest rock stars in the world, Freddie Mercury. It is no wonder then that the outbreak of HIV and its consequences made a shockwave through the art world, inspiring many artists to create new, moving, insightful, often warning images.
Nicholas Nixon 's portrait photographs of AIDS victims in the s captured with extreme realism the physical deterioration of the human body, making them a particularly poignant form of decay art.
Whatever we were taught to believe, we now can see that our reality as a whole is a developing one, in a constant state of flux, and that some issues need to be readdressed over and over again - in politics, in the media, and the arts - before they are truly dealt with.
The renewed need to stand up to racial prejudice and explore the causes of it is an obvious example of such unfinished business. Race , ethnicity and culture are some of the most crucial concepts not only in the field of sociology but also in contemporary society.
In its primary meaning, race is a classification of people according to their physical traits and geographic ancestry. If we think about it carefully, the notion of race plays an important role in everyday human contacts and outcomes of such seemingly routinized interactions.
Similarly to race, the term ethnic group is another societal category that cannot be separated from the concept of culture. People who share the same ethnicity share common culture, including language, religion, customs, and history. To put it clearly, it is not so much the biological differences that define racial groups, but rather how these groups have been treated throughout history. In other words, how racial groups are defined is an ongoing and ever-changing social process.
There have been numberless disputes, conflicts and wars fought in the name of race and culture , usually fueled by discrimination between the two different parties. In it perhaps ingrained in human nature to criticize and attack those who are different from us and label them with derogatory, unpleasant words.
On the other hand, there are such luminous examples of the 20th century as The Black Arts Movement. When it comes to culture, cultural wars are the result of conflicting ideas on the moral code, beliefs and values, which makes them one of the omnipresent human issues.
In a nutshell, the notion of race was originally based on physical traits while culture on various beliefs and values, but due to globalization, the processes of cultural and racial mixing have achieved complex outcomes.
People of the same race adopted different cultures, while people with the same culture may belong to different races. This phenomenon of blurred lines between race and culture is prominent especially in the United States, the very epicenter of globalization and immigration. Many people see pop culture in different forms. Some may see pop culture in a comic book series or on social media platforms.
There are some things that people do not feel should be considered being a part of pop culture. Everything has a meaning, within the meaning of the object is some form of art seen by others. Pop culture encompasses a variety of work with different styles of art.
Any form of art can be considered being a part of pop culture. It started with four artists: andy warhol, roy lichtenstein, james rosenquist, and claes oldenburg. All four artists took their inspiration from mass media and the pop culture of the time. What came to mind? Due to its objectivity, art is all encompassing: It can be anything created, written, performed, or photographed within which someone finds beauty. Architecture in every life reflects the culture of every society interacting closely with the history, politics and social feature of the society.
Change in the cultural or social attitude has greatest impact on architecture. Thus it would be generic to conclude that the role of culture in promoting an architectural style or era is an essential part of its existence. It is now a part of the scene, a part of what we call popular culture. The popular culture is more defined by what is displayed in mass-medias such as the MTV or Lifestyle magazines or Daily newspapers.
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