chapter 35, READING, HIGH VS. LOW

Gans strikes me as a cultural relativist disguised as a perspectivist. why?
he attributes these differences between high and low to "taste." and the taste is given -he would say- by intersubjective norms, but he doesn't press further that the a work is better because notes in the work that elicit notes which become a norm.

in the end we get an "elite" taste and a "commons" taste. the point is that given any subset of "low" you can find we always get a niche of experts, i.e, we get "elites" in each sub common category. but i'm ahead of myself.

in the middle of all this is the history of high/low, which goes back to 18th century. it's a modern thing. then there is cultural evolution: early 20th century, movies were "low" when compared to theater, now it reigns. rock music was attacked by establishment and many jazz players (rock was a competition to earlier swing music from jazz bands, note: charlie parker hated it because it lacked the harmonic complexity of jazz).

... popular art is dominated by a need for familiar forms, an intolerance of ambiguity, a tendency toward easiness and indulgence in stimulated emotion. In spite of all this he thinks there “is a time and place even for popular art. 

who doubts that mcdonald's whooper sandwhich is a masterpiece? 

Novitz defends a form of conventionalism which makes high a product of the elites. but that ignores that opera was popular when it came out (there was opera a opera buffa or comic). jazz was quite popular when it came up in new orleans in the 1920s. now it's a classical form, the chinese and venezuelans take classical music to new hights in their youth symphony orchestras.

Carroll (1998) seems to defend a sort of objectivist position. he argues that the key theoretical concept is not that of popular art but of "mass art" that is to say, art that is mass-produced and distributed in multiple quantities as a species of popular art, which he defines as the art of the commons. what makes this possible?

the commons? or the media? (many argue with the advent of social media that it's both)

1. massification. to appeal the mass work must gravitate "toward the lowest level of taste, sensitivity, and intelligence".
2. passivity. genuine art should require active spectatorship, yet mass art abets passive reception. it's easy and safe.
3. formulaic. a common complaint is that popular or mass art is formulaic,whereas real art is original in its conception and in its goals.

this has three points:

1. multiples
2. produced and distributed by a mass technology
3. intentionally designed to gravitate in its structural choices (for example, its narrative forms, symbolism, intended affect, and even its content) toward those choices that promise accessibility with minimum effort. . . for the largest number of untutored (or relatively untutored) audiences."

since Carroll bites the bullet, we should think through his points: 

point 1. lowest means saleable. that's definitely a concern of producers today. 2. passivity? how does one define that? techno is repetitive. but so is minimalism in contemporary music. how is mass music being distributed in the radio more "passive" than a more challenging music form? 3. formulaic. definitely! main stream reggeton is a good example.