Foucault, Laertes, and Mathew Mcconaughey... yes please!

Oftentimes it's easy to think about the objects or tastes of what constitute “high-brow culture” and “low-brow culture” rather than the ways those objects are controlled in relation to those given access to them. I found one of the most interesting aspects of Chapter 3 to be the way in which Levine discusses policing/social mechanisms used to control the ways in which the objects of “culture” are interacted with and absorbed by the audience. The breakdown of the cultural levees that separated regions, classes, immigrants from non-immigrants, and the intelligentsia from the uneducated that transformed previously public arenas of expression and interaction with art in to a uniformed and disseminated copy of the private spaces controlled by the “culturally elite” was fascinatingly proposed. Plotting the sterilization of audience behavior in correlation to the ways the objects of culture were policed and displayed by the cultural elite proposes some interesting implications for the way we understand culture in both the Arnoldian sense and the Raymond Williams sense of what precisely culture is and how it is used.

When the objects of supposed “high-culture” are usurped by the popular, they do not become lost in a sea of “undisciplined, raucous behavior.” (198) As part of their three pronged attack, the cultural elite turned to transforming the public space of the theater or museum. This effectively turned a public space in to a mapped extension of the private by dictating to and disciplining those who would leave the opera early or applaud mid-scene during a play. When you can't control who sees the object of art, it would only make sense to control the ways in which the art can be seen and interacted with. This shift to “spectator from witness”(194) and from interactive public spaces of viewership towards a policed area of properly placed “Bravos!,” controlled laughter, and applause tells us a lot more about taste than perhaps any list or chart of objects. Obviously, the behaviors associated with certain viewing cultures are an alienating force delineating “high” from “low” brow culture and are powerful variables worth discussing when taste and access to assumed levels of culture are concerned.

Even today, the ways in which we interact with the most pervasive art form in our society (film... don't jump down my throat for not saying it's television) is far removed from the interactive public space of art in nineteenth century America. The same rules that apply to seeing Hamlet are the same as those projected up on the silver screen before the latest Matthew Mcconaughey romantic comedy(term used loosely) which are quite similar to the rules we abide by when we attend a museum or jazz show. The curtailing of our behavior in the public space of art lingers.