1. The Great Divide | Digital Plenitude

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.

Links below are examples cited in Chapter 1 to illustrate the breakdown of hierarchies in 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 do not entirely dismiss cultural hierarchies.

The Philadelphia Story (1940). American culture had almost, but not fully, abandoned social class distinctions.

Chuck Berry, "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956). Popular music accelerated the postwar breakdown of cultural hierarchy.

The Case of Music

Brian Eno's Music for Airports (1978), music that crosses over from popular to classical traditions.

The Philip Glass Ensemble, minimalist music that also crosses boundaries between classical and popular forms.

Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring caused a riot at its premiere in 1913. It is hard to imagine avant-garde music causing a riot today.

Avant-Garde

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

John Cage performs Water Walk on "I've Got a Secret." His claim: this is music.

Further Links and Examples

JAY-Z's Picasso Baby crosses the boundary between popular music and elite art by staging performance-art references.
Fantasia (1940) reflects pre-WWII ambivalence toward high culture. See Mickey Respectfully Approaches the Maestro.
Yves Klein's A Leap into the Void, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows how avant-garde gestures are institutionalized.
Morley Safer's report on Miami's Art Basel: Morley vs. the Art World.
deviantART and Artsy represent contrasting approaches to democratized and curated art worlds.
Thomas Kinkade's site highlights tensions between popularity, collectability, and kitsch judgments.
E. D. Hirsch's project of shared cultural knowledge continues at the Core Knowledge Foundation.