Art is often about spectacle and it's what I do, and if dreaming were only for children, so much achievement would simply never happen -- people would decide to stop taking risks, stop moving forward, stop challenging their world and become drones at "adulthood".
The problem of prolonged adolescence and childhood in American culture is real. But I don't believe the answer to that is being dour, anymore than I believe the culprit is any particular genre of art, entertainment or mass media or culture. We are, among other things, a culture of addictions, many of them made up so we can avoid responsibility. That to me is our great national weakness, not this really annoying (and obviously bait material) notion you have that a book in the sci-fi genre could never possibly be intellectually challenging. How narrow-minded of you to be so utterly certain you know exactly how the world works. Most of us have the good sense not to even presume we know it for ourselves, much less other people.
The concepts of high and low culture exist so that we can feel better about what we do and don't like, without having to examine why, which doesn't do much to better either end of that very artificial spectrum.
I don't want to get into a discussion of what the purpose of art is, or even if it has a purpose, but if its goal is to move an audience -- emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, politicallly -- whatever -- shouldn't as many different languages as possible be available in the creator's toolbox?
To me, the only thing fundamentally wrong with pop culture, is that as a nation we don't seem to grasp the artificiality of our reality TV, and that in order for much of the self-proclaimed intelligencia to condemn current spectacles, we try as hard as possible to avoid learning anything about how they evolved, often from so-called high art, into being.
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Re: Anti-Intellectualism
Date: 2003-07-06 02:13 pm (UTC)The problem of prolonged adolescence and childhood in American culture is real. But I don't believe the answer to that is being dour, anymore than I believe the culprit is any particular genre of art, entertainment or mass media or culture. We are, among other things, a culture of addictions, many of them made up so we can avoid responsibility. That to me is our great national weakness, not this really annoying (and obviously bait material) notion you have that a book in the sci-fi genre could never possibly be intellectually challenging. How narrow-minded of you to be so utterly certain you know exactly how the world works. Most of us have the good sense not to even presume we know it for ourselves, much less other people.
The concepts of high and low culture exist so that we can feel better about what we do and don't like, without having to examine why, which doesn't do much to better either end of that very artificial spectrum.
I don't want to get into a discussion of what the purpose of art is, or even if it has a purpose, but if its goal is to move an audience -- emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, politicallly -- whatever -- shouldn't as many different languages as possible be available in the creator's toolbox?
To me, the only thing fundamentally wrong with pop culture, is that as a nation we don't seem to grasp the artificiality of our reality TV, and that in order for much of the self-proclaimed intelligencia to condemn current spectacles, we try as hard as possible to avoid learning anything about how they evolved, often from so-called high art, into being.