POPULAR CULTURE

The term popular culture, often shortened to pop culture, crystallized around the middle of the twentieth century in recognition of the definitive emergence in European and especially North American society of mass-produced and -consumed cultural goods (including novels, recorded music, radio programs, motion pictures, and advertisements). Popular culture products are usually created by people who do not classify themselves as artists, and they are accepted by people who do not think of themselves as exercising aesthetic judgments. Other, more pejorative terms that have been used to refer to this phenomenon are mass culture (José Ortega y Gasset and others) and the culture industry (Theodor W. Adorno). The term was fashioned after the pop art ("popular art") movement that emerged in the late 1950s—a movement that saw artists appropriate images and commodities from consumerist culture as their subject matter. One of the most famous pop artists was the American Andy Warhol (1928?–1987), who created paintings and silk-screen prints of commonplace objects, such as soup cans, and pictures of celebrities, such as the actress Marilyn Monroe. Pop culture involves the representation of any aspect of consumerist society, not just visual, emphasizing the powerful impact of consumerism and materialism on contemporary life. Pop culture rejects both the supremacy of the "high art" of the past and the pretensions of avant-garde intellectualist trends of the present. It is highly appealing for this very reason. It bestows on common people the assurance that artistic texts are for mass consumption, not just for an elite class of cognoscenti. It is thus populist, popular, and public.

"High," "Low," and "Pop" Culture

Culture is a system of shared meanings. The Estonian semiotician Yuri M. Lotman (1922–1993) used the term semiosphere to encapsulate that very fact and to emphasize that the ways in which people come to understand the world is through the semiotic filters of the language, music, myths, rituals, and other codes that they acquire in cultural context (Lotman 1990).

The adjectives high, low, and popular have been used with culture to differentiate between levels of representation within the semiosphere. "High" culture implies a level considered to have a superior value, socially and aesthetically, than other levels, which are said to have a "lower" value. Traditionally, the high and low levels were associated with class distinctions—high culture was associated with the church and the aristocracy in Western Europe; low culture with "common folk." "Pop culture" emerged in the twentieth century, obliterating this distinction. As John Storey (2003) argues, the idea of pop culture replaced that of "folk" culture, becoming a target of autonomous academic study in the late 1950s when the French semiotician Roland Barthes (1915–1980) showed the importance of studying such things as wrestling and blockbuster movies in terms of how they generate cultural meanings. By the early twenty-first century, the study of pop culture had become a flourishing interdisciplinary area of investigation that had several important journals, including the Journal of Popular Culture (founded in 1967).

As Jean Baudrillard (1998) has emphasized, pop culture engages the masses, rather than the cognoscenti, because it takes the material of everyday life and gives it expression and meaning. Everything from comic books to fashion shows have mass appeal because they emanate from within the culture, not from sponsors or authority figures. As such, the makers of pop culture make little or no distinction between art and recreation, distraction and engagement.

The spread of pop culture as a kind of mainstream culture has been brought about by developments in cheap technology. The rise of music as a mass art, for instance, was made possible by the advent of recording and radio broadcasting technologies at the start of the twentieth century. Records and radio made music available to large audiences, converting it from an art for the elite to a commodity for one and all. The late-twentieth-century advent of satellite technology is responsible for the spread and appeal of pop culture throughout the globe. Satellite television, for example, is often cited as bringing about the disintegration of the former soviet system in Europe, as people became attracted to images of consumerist delights by simply tuning into American television programs. The Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) went so far as to claim that the diffusion of pop culture images through electronic media has brought about a type of "global culture" that strangely unites people in a kind of "global village" (McLuhan 1964). Clearly, the pop culture distraction factory has had an impact on the world far greater than that of the material it communicates.

Pop Culture as a Mythological System

Barthes (1957) claimed that a large part of the emotional allure of pop culture is due to the fact that it is based on the recycling of deeply entrenched mythical meanings. To distinguish between the original myths and their pop culture versions, Barthes designated the latter mythologies. In early Hollywood westerns, for instance, the mythic struggle of good versus evil manifested itself in various symbolic and representational forms—heroes wore white hats and villains black ones; heroes were honest and truthful, villains dishonest and cowardly; and so on. The Superman character of comic book and cinematic fame, to cite another example, is a perfect example of a recycled hero, possessing all the characteristics of his mythic predecessors but in modern guise—he comes from another world (the planet Krypton) in order to help humanity overcome its weaknesses; he has superhuman powers; but he has a tragic flaw (exposure to the fictitious substance known as kryptonite takes away his power). Barthes claimed that pop culture is an overarching "mythological system." And because of this it imbues its own representations and spectacles with an unconsciously felt cogency.

As a consequence, Barthes argued, pop culture has had a profound impact on modern-day ethics. In the historical development of ethics, three principal standards of conduct have been proposed as the highest good: happiness or pleasure; duty, virtue, or obligation; and perfection, the fullest harmonious development of human potential. In traditional cultures, these standards were established through religious and philosophical traditions. In pop culture, they are shaped by spectacles, performances, and especially media representations. Ethical issues that are showcased on television, for example, are felt as being more significant and historically meaningful to society than those that are not. Television imbues them with significance and salience.

The power of the media to affect the interpretation of ethical behavior has inevitably led people to stage events for the cameras. The social critic Walter Truett Anderson (1990) calls these appropriately "pseudoevents," because they are never spontaneous, but planned for the sole purpose of playing to pop culture's huge audiences. Most pseudoevents are intended to be self-fulfilling prophecies. The media are thus the vehicles through which people come to grips with issues of lifestyle, ethics, and morality. The understanding of them, however, is fragmentary and ephemeral because the images of media are constantly in flux. The only constant in pop culture is, in fact, constant change. With few exceptions, most pop culture products and styles come and go quickly. Thus, while it has great appeal, pop culture has also had a powerful negative impact on traditional approaches to ethics.

Summary

Pop culture has become virtually mainstream culture, having obliterated the distinction between high, low, and folk culture. It has become a powerful force in modern-day society because it has great emotional appeal and because of its built-in tendency for constant change. The comic-book art of Charles Schulz (1922–2000) is a case in point. His comic strip Peanuts, which was originally titled Li'l Folks, debuted in 1950, appealing to mass audiences. Through the strip Schultz dealt with some of the most profound religious and philosophical themes of human history in a way that was unique and aesthetically powerful.

The movie Amadeus is another case-in-point. This 1984 work directed by Milos Forman (b. 1932) became a pop culture phenomenon in the decade of the 1980s. It is based on the 1979 play by British playwright Peter Shaffer (b. 1926) about the eighteenth-century rivalry between Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Italian composer Antonio Salieri. The play plumbs the meaning of art, genius, and the important role of music in the spiritual life of human beings. The film captures these themes visually and acoustically by juxtaposing the emotionally powerful music of Mozart against the backdrop of dramatized events in his life and the truly splendid commentaries of Salieri, who guides the audience through the musical repertoire with remarkable insight and perspicacity. Forman's camera shots, close-ups, angle shots, tracking shots (which capture horizontal movement), and zooming actions allows the viewer to literally see Mozart's moods (his passions, his tragedies, and so forth) on his face as he conducts or plays his music, as well as those of his commentator Salieri (his envy, his deep understanding of Mozart's art) as he speaks to his confessor. In effect, Mozart became a pop culture hero, so to speak, through the power of cinema.

MARCEL DANESI

SEE ALSO Consumerism;Critical Social Theory;Entertainment;Information Ethics;Movies;Music;Robot Toys;Technocomics;Television.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Walter Truett. (1990). Reality Isn't What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Barthes, Roland. (1957). Mythologies. Paris: Seuil. A critical analysis of the mythological structure of pop culture performances, from wrestling matches to blockbuster movies.

Baudrillard, Jean. (1998). The Consumer Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. An acerbic critique of the image-making techniques of consumerist culture and their effect on human cultural development.

Lotman, Yuri M. (1990). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. A groundbreaking study of the semiosphere, showing that human psychic life is governed by sign-making tendencies that are tied to social context in the same way that human biological life is governed by organic tendencies that are tied to physical context.

Ortega y Gasset, José. (1932). The Revolt of the Masses. New York: Norton. Originally published in Spanish, 1929.

McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill. The classic study of the effects of technology and media on cultural evolution. The basic idea presented here is that media are extensions of sensory processes and thus felt to be emotionally powerful.

Storey, John. (2003). Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization. Malden, MA: Blackwell. In-depth analysis of the ideological structure of pop culture and its manifestations in the political and social spheres.