The great division between elite art and popular culture has almost, but not quite, vanished. What replaces that division is not a consensus about art, but the diverse judgments of many communities. Each community is free to define its art as central, and some do, but they cannot enforce their definition across our culture, as the elites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were able to do. This is what the plenitude means for art today. 

​Links to some of the examples cited in Chapter 1 to illustrate the breakdown of hierarchies in our media culture in the twentieth century and particularly since the 1950s.

The Philadelphia (Orchestra) Story

A Night at the Opera (1935) The Marx Brothers make fun of opera, but their film does not entirely dismiss the hierarchies of high culture.

The Philadelphia Story (1940) American culture has almost (but not yet quite) abandoned the notion of social (as opposed to economic) class.

Chuck Berry, "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956) Popular music contributes to the breakdown of cultural hierarchy after WWII

The case of music

​​Brian Eno's Music for airports (1978) is an example of music that "crosses over" from popular to classical. 

The Philip Glass Ensemble: Music in Twelve Parts (Ostrava Gong)
Minimalist music that "crosses over" between classical and popular.

Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring caused a riot at its première in 1913. It is unthinkable that avant-garde music could cause a riot today. 

Avant-garde

My Kid Could Paint That (2007) captures the ambivalences in contemporary attitudes toward art. 

Avant-garde composer John Cage performs Water Walk on the popular game show "I've Got a Secret." His secret is that this is music. 

Links to further sites and videos (images included for reasons of copyright)

JAY-Z is one of the most successful rappers. Picasso Baby shows how he seeks to cross the boundary between one of the more popular forms of contemporary music and what is left of the elite art scene. In the song, JAY-Z claims to be the new Picasso. The video shows him performing with performance artist Marina Abromovic and others.

Fantasia: This full-length animated film was released in 1940. Like A Night at the Opera, it represents the ambivalent attitude to high culture in the period prior to World War II.  Mickey Respectfully Approaches the Maestro 

Yves Klein's photo A Leap into the Void.
It is on display in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Morley Safer's 2012 encounter with the art world at Miami's Art Basel.

​deviantART.com is a perfect example of the democratization of art, the flattening of a former elite hierarchy. ​Compare this to artsy.net, a site designed to teach you about and to sell you "significant" art (what used to be elite art).

The popular painter Thomas Kinkade died in 2012. Kinkade’s website may be right in claiming that he was America’s “Most Collected Artist.” Yet his work is considered kitsch by many (most?) in the traditional art community. 

In Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, E. D. Hirsch argued that Americans, particularly students, had lost a fund of shared knowledge about their culture and history. The book appeared at a time when it still seemed feasible to shore up and rei state the hierarchy of knowledge. Hirsch went on to produce a Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and a series of textbooks and to create an organization, The Core Knowledge Foundation 
(www.coreknowledge.org).