High culture

"High art" redirects here. For the film, see High Art.

A bust of Beethoven by Hugo Hagen

High Culture is a term that comprehends the cultural products of æsthetic value, which a society collectively esteem as art. In popular usage, the term high culture identifies the culture of an upper class (an aristocracy) or of a status class (the intelligentsia); and also identifies a society’s common repository of broad-range knowledge and tradition (e.g. folk culture) that transcends the social-class system of the society. Sociologically, the term high culture is contrasted with the term low culture, the forms of popular culture characteristic of the less-educated social classes, such as the barbarians, the Philistines, and hoi polloi (the masses).

Concept

As a concept, high culture has a longer history in Continental Europe, until the mid-19th century, when Matthew Arnold introduced the term high culture into English usage, with Culture and Anarchy (1869); although he most often uses the word “culture”. In the Preface, Arnold defined culture as “the disinterested endeavour after man’s perfection” and said that possessing culture was to “know the best that has been said and thought in the world”, a literary definition that also comprehends Philosophy. Moreover, the aesthetic philosophy proposed high culture as a force for moral and political good; likewise, Arnold’s definition of the term '“high culture” is contrasted with the terms “popular culture” and “mass culture”.

In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), T. S. Eliot said that high culture and popular culture are necessary and complementary parts of a complete culture. The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart (1957) was an influential work along somewhat the same lines, concerned with the cultural experience of those, like himself, who had come from a working-class background before university. In America, Harold Bloom has taken a more exclusive line in a number of works, as did F. R. Leavis earlier—both, like Arnold, being mainly concerned with literature, and unafraid to champion vociferously the literature of the Western canon.

T.S. Eliot

In the Western tradition high culture has historical origins in the intellectual and aesthetic ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. Within this classical ideal certain authors and their modes of language were held up as models of an elevated style and good form as for instance the Attic dialect of ancient Greek associated with the great philosophers and dramatists of Periclean Athens, or Ciceronian Latin. Later, especially during the Renaissance, these values were deeply imbibed by the cultural upper classes, and (as evinced in works like The Courtier by Baldasare Castiglione) knowledge of the classics became part of the aristocratic ideal. Over time, the refined classicism of the Renaissance was expanded to embrace a broader canon of authors in the modern languages that included figures such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, and Victor Hugo.

In both the Western and some East Asian traditions, art that demonstrates the imagination of the artist has been accorded the highest status. In the West this tradition goes back to the Ancient Greeks, and was reinforced in the Renaissance and by Romanticism, although the latter also did away with the hierarchy of genres within the fine arts established in the Renaissance. In China there was a distinction between the literati painting by the scholar-officials and the work produced by common artists, working in largely different styles, or the decorative arts such as Chinese porcelain which were produced by unknown craftsmen working in large factories. In both China and the West the distinction was especially clear in landscape painting, where for centuries imaginary views, produced from the imagination of the artist, were considered superior works.

For centuries an immersion in high culture was deemed an essential part of the proper education of the gentleman, and this ideal was transmitted through high-status schools and institutions throughout Europe and the United States. As it has evolved, Western notions of high culture have been associated at various times with: The study of "humane letters" especially the Greek and Latin classics and more broadly all works considered to be part of "the canon"; the cultivation of refined etiquette and manners; an appreciation of the fine arts – especially sculpture and painting; a knowledge of such literature, drama, and poetry considered to be of high caliber; enjoyment of European classical music and opera; religion and theology often with a special focus on Europe's predominantly Christian tradition; rhetoric and politics; the study of philosophy and history; a taste for gourmet cuisine and wine; being well traveled and especially "The Grand Tour of Europe"; certain sports associated with the upper classes, such as polo, equestrianism, fencing, and yachting.

High art

Much of high culture consists of the appreciation of what is sometimes called "High Art". This term is rather broader than Arnold's definition and besides literature includes music, visual arts (especially painting), and traditional forms of the performing arts (including some cinema). The decorative arts would not generally be considered High Art.

The cultural products most often regarded as forming part of high culture are most likely to have been produced during periods of High civilization, for which a large, sophisticated and wealthy urban-based society provides a coherent and conscious aesthetic framework, and a large-scale milieu of training, and, for the visual arts, sourcing materials and financing work. Such an environment enables artists, as near as possible, to realize their creative potential with as few as possible practical and technical constraints. Although the Western concept of high culture naturally concentrates on the Graeco-Roman tradition, and its resumption from the Renaissance onwards, such conditions existed in other places at other times.

Art music

Main article: Art music

Art music (or serious music or erudite music) is an umbrella term used to refer to musical traditions implying advanced structural and theoretical considerations and a written musical tradition. The notion of art music is a frequent and well-defined musicological distinction - musicologist Philip Tagg, for example, refers to art music as one of an "axiomatic triangle consisting of 'folk', 'art' and 'popular' musics". He explains that each of these three is distinguishable from the others according to certain criteria, with high cultural music often performed to an audience whilst folk music would traditionally be more participatory. In this regard, "art music" frequently occurs as a contrasting term to "popular music" and to "traditional" or "folk music".

Art film

Main article: Art film

Art film is the result of filmmaking which is typically a serious, independent film aimed at a niche market rather than a mass market audience. Film critics and film studies scholars typically define an "art film" using a "...canon of films and those formal qualities that mark them as different from mainstream Hollywood films", which includes, among other elements: a social realism style; an emphasis on the authorial expressivity of the director; and a focus on the thoughts and dreams of characters, rather than presenting a clear, goal-driven story. According to the film scholar David Bordwell, "art cinema itself is a film genre, with its own distinct conventions."

Promotion of high culture

Dancers from the Ballet Rambert, under the auspices of CEMA, a government programme, perform Peter and The Wolf at an aircraft factory in the English Midlands during World War II

The term has always been susceptible to attack for elitism, and, in response, many proponents of the concept devoted great efforts to promoting high culture among a wider public than the highly educated bourgeoisie whose natural territory it was supposed to be. There was a drive, beginning in the 19th century, to open museums and concert halls to give the general public access to high culture. Figures such as John Ruskin and Lord Reith of the BBC in Britain, Leon Trotsky and others in Communist Russia, and many others in America and throughout the western world have worked to widen the appeal of elements of high culture such as classical music, Art by old masters and the literary classics.

With the widening of access to university education, the effort spread there, and all aspects of high culture became the objects of academic study, which with the exception of the classics had not often been the case until the late 19th century. University liberal arts courses still play an important role in the promotion of the concept of high culture, though often now avoiding the term itself.

Especially in Europe, governments have been prepared to subsidize high culture through the funding of museums, opera and ballet companies, orchestras, cinema, public broadcasting stations such as BBC Radio 3, ARTE and in other ways. Organisations such as the Arts Council of Great Britain, and in most European countries, whole ministries administer these programmes. This includes the subsidy of new works by composers, writers and artists. There are also many private philanthropic sources of funding, which are especially important in the US, where the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting also funds broadcasting. These may be seen as part of the broader concept of official culture, although often a mass audience is not the intended market.

Theories of High Culture

Ernest Renan (Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon, 1870s)

The relations between High Culture and Mass Culture are concerns of cultural studies, media studies, and critical theory, sociology, Postmodernism and Marxist philosophy. In the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Walter Benjamin explored the relations of value of the arts (High and Mass) when subjected to industrial reproduction. The critical theoreticians Theodor W. Adorno and Antonio Gramsci interpreted the high-art and mass-art cultural relations as an instrument of social control, with which the ruling class maintain their cultural hegemony upon society.

For the Orientalist Ernest Renan and for the rationalist philosopher Ernest Gellner, high culture was conceptually integral to the politics and ideology of nationalism, as a requisite part of a healthy national identity. Gelner expanded the conceptual scope of the and proposed that additional to the fine arts, the concept of high art defined In Nations and Nationalism (1983), Gellner said that high art is “a literate, codified culture, which permits context-free communication”among cultures.

In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu proposed that æsthetic taste (cultural judgement), derived from social class, in establishing definitions of high art by the practice of human activities such as social etiquette, gastronomy, oenology, military service. That in such activities of aesthetic judgement, the ruling-class person uses social codes unknown to middle- and the lower-class persons in the pursuit and practice activities of taste.

See also

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References

• Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press.
• Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: an Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1974. xii, 179 p. ISBN 0-465-06021-8
• Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989. ix, 269 p. ISBN 0-415-90037-9 (pbk.)

External links

• Full text of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy online
• Memory and modernity:reflections on Ernest Gellner's theory of nationalism - Lecture text by Anthony D Smith