Unit 12: Varieties of Commercial Art

Question 1

Identify interchanges between the worlds of high and low art of style, structure, content, and genre.

Answer 1

High Art:

• aesthetic contemplation
• higher value, fine art
• limited audience
• unique, complex, single or limited production
• higher class audience

Low Art:

• functional art
• lower value, craft
• popular
• formulaic, simple, easily accessed, mass-produced
• low class audience

Question 2

List basic critical priorities that can be applied to both popular art and elite art.

Answer 2

• Targets specific demographics
• Commodifies art into a cultural product
• Generates profit by businesses who operate it
• Perpetuate class systems
• Operate in a capitalist system

Question 3

Apply basic criteria of evaluation to distinguish between good and bad popular art.

Answer 3

1. Technical skill
2. Content or meaning
3. Mass audience appeal
4. Invokes an emotional response
5. Revenue
   6.

Question 4

Recognize areas of tradition from which both high art and low art draw.

Answer 4

• The concept of high and low can be traced back to 18th century ideas about fine art and craft. Writers in the 1700s drew a line between work that is contemplated purely for aesthetics (fine art) and work that has some sort of utility or function (craft). The familiar phrase “art for art’s sake” comes out of this view, and is so culturally pervasive that many people accept it as the “correct” way to classify art.
• Highbrow and lowbrow cultural products serve as social and status markers
• Initially Shakespeare theatre attracted all classes of people but eventually the elite class standardized the Shakespearean text.

Question 5

Identify instances in which high and low art penetrate and influence each other.

Answer 5

• The middlebrow is where high and low art converge.
• Blending of lowbrow and highbrow, bringing the generic traits of lowbrow into conversation with the formalist and structural concerns of highbrow. Example: Pulp Fiction
• Strange Brew is an example whereby high art (Hamlet) influence the low art of a comedy film. Strange Brew adds farce and Canadian content, in a largely unrecognized revision of Hamlet that runs throughout the film, though secondary to the primary plot.
• When a topic or plot structure becomes unacceptable to an audience, the work may be revised to bring it in line with contemporary audience expectations.

Question 6

Canada’s Media Landscape

Answer 6

• Canada’s media landscape practices a different ecology. Historically, it has been easier to export American cultural products to English-speaking parts of Canada than vice versa.
• As Canada entered World War II to side with Britain in 1939, the Canadian publishing industry benefitted from an import ban on American fiction periodicals.
• In 1971, Canada imposed a regulation requiring 35% Canadian content for radio stations; in Quebec, the requirement is 65%. It was hoped that requiring Canadian content would allow the local industry to grow in Canada rather than Americanizing Canadian talent. (CanCon = Canadian Content)
• For the purposes of CanCon, the definition of “Canadian” is fairly specific: one must reside in Canada for six months prior to writing or producing the work and be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.
• As it seems CanCon does little to protect Canadian culture itself, the protection and nurturing of Canadian industry (and the resulting tax base) may be the most realistic motive for Canadian content regulations.
• “The world needs more Canada,” but Canadian products may come to look less and less Canadian as they meet American production methods and demands.

Question 7

Reading - “Conclusion: The Popular Economy”

Answer 7

• Proposed by John Fiske
• Late capitalist societies are composed of a huge variety of social groups and subcultures, all held together in a network of social relations in which the most significant factor is the differential distribution of power.
• Argues that people are not a passive, helpless mass.
• For a cultural commodity to be popular, it must be able to meet the various interests of the people amongst whom it is popular as well as the interests of its producers.
• Two economies: financial (production and distribution) and cultural (meanings, pleasures, and social identities)
• The power of audience-as-producers in the cultural economy is considerable.
• The audience determines which cultural products will succeed by their decoding of meaning and pleasure; whereas, the production and distributors provoke those meanings sometimes unsuccessfully.
• Power is a two-way force: top-down power (social power) and bottom up power (semiotic power); media can be power of surveillance and power as resistance.
• Fantasy embodies the power of the subordinate to exert some control over representation. It is a direct response to the dominant ideology and its embodiment in social relations. Fiske appears to favour fantasy for its power of resistance.
• The domination in the economic domain may not necessarily produce the equivalent domination in the cultural.
• The making of materials into culture (meanings of self and social relations) can only be performed by their consumer-users.

Question 8

Pulp Fiction

Answer 8

• Pulp Fiction is a movie about developing character. If the three main characters each represent one kind of man, the movie begins to make sense as a progression through the formation of character, from the id, to the ego, to the superego or highest state of moral development
• The three stories in Pulp Fiction all concern three men whose lives are endangered when someone else’s life is in their hands.
• The movie is both a product of pulp fiction and a critique of pulp.