(because I needed a picture as well) While reading chapter three, I couldn’t help but think of Clockwork Orange and considering whether or not art really does have a healing element to it. It seems to me—especially in Levine’s examples—that discipline works more through shame (thank you Foucault) and that the arts served more as a setting in which disciplinary acts were executed. I also think that this method of discipline is inconspicuously effective because it does not come from the government or a repressive authority (a la Althusser) but a voluntary structure to which we submit because we are indoctrinated into an ideology of “we are civilized humans who appreciate Mozart, therefore we behave like…”
I was actually quite impressed with the introduction in which I think Levine does an excellent job of identifying the arbitrariness of brow/taste identification and how it stems from an obsession with trying to categorize people and types/levels of appreciation. However, I think that this paranoia of placement has nothing to do with our assertion that the masses cannot appreciate Culture on the same level as the erudite, upper-echelons of society, and that to canonize products of mass culture is to diminish the value of Art. Instead, I think it actually reflects the structure of American capitalism—we have to limit the amount of highbrow people, those select few who seriously appreciate art, so as not to depreciate their value in and to society. By enforcing limitations—on what we consider “serious” art and what we consider a “serious” spectator—we think we are protecting Art and ourselves from devaluation that comes whenever there is a surplus of something (i.e. too many forms of art and too many art connoisseurs.)
This just demonstrates the hypocrisy of highbrow culture, which predicates itself on the idea of exclusivity and then continuously has to invent ways in which it differs from mass culture in order to maintain its position as a subculture of Culture (which I would kind of like to call Culture².) The ideology of Culture² is that it transcends the vulgarities of everyday life, something that comes up at the beginning of “Order, Hierarchy, and Culture” in which Levine talks about the cultural disapproval of the “vast crude democracy of trade” and the “‘monsters of the mere market,’ which now overwhelmed such aesthetically and spiritually satisfying landmarks as New York’s Trinity Church or Castle Garden” (172). It seems to me that Levine misses an opportunity here to talk about the fear of excess—not just of the “frightening excesses of ‘the vulgar and uneducated masses’” (173)—but also how an excess (of people who were being steadily admitted into museums, who were filling up the opera house and concert hall) of people in these cultural havens were threatening the value of cultural capital and the environment of the more “civilized society.” This may be more applicable to Lynes’s work, but I think that Levine ignores the fact that the opening of the museum to people is what caused the flood of complaints to newspapers.
I was actually quite impressed with the introduction in which I think Levine does an excellent job of identifying the arbitrariness of brow/taste identification and how it stems from an obsession with trying to categorize people and types/levels of appreciation. However, I think that this paranoia of placement has nothing to do with our assertion that the masses cannot appreciate Culture on the same level as the erudite, upper-echelons of society, and that to canonize products of mass culture is to diminish the value of Art. Instead, I think it actually reflects the structure of American capitalism—we have to limit the amount of highbrow people, those select few who seriously appreciate art, so as not to depreciate their value in and to society. By enforcing limitations—on what we consider “serious” art and what we consider a “serious” spectator—we think we are protecting Art and ourselves from devaluation that comes whenever there is a surplus of something (i.e. too many forms of art and too many art connoisseurs.)
This just demonstrates the hypocrisy of highbrow culture, which predicates itself on the idea of exclusivity and then continuously has to invent ways in which it differs from mass culture in order to maintain its position as a subculture of Culture (which I would kind of like to call Culture².) The ideology of Culture² is that it transcends the vulgarities of everyday life, something that comes up at the beginning of “Order, Hierarchy, and Culture” in which Levine talks about the cultural disapproval of the “vast crude democracy of trade” and the “‘monsters of the mere market,’ which now overwhelmed such aesthetically and spiritually satisfying landmarks as New York’s Trinity Church or Castle Garden” (172). It seems to me that Levine misses an opportunity here to talk about the fear of excess—not just of the “frightening excesses of ‘the vulgar and uneducated masses’” (173)—but also how an excess (of people who were being steadily admitted into museums, who were filling up the opera house and concert hall) of people in these cultural havens were threatening the value of cultural capital and the environment of the more “civilized society.” This may be more applicable to Lynes’s work, but I think that Levine ignores the fact that the opening of the museum to people is what caused the flood of complaints to newspapers.
pictures make the world go 'round
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