Anna wants to know why art is still imagined as an elitist enterprise, especially when there is such an “indie” (i.e. organic, collective, unfunded) culture around localised performing arts practice in Adelaide (where she lives and works). It’s not often I get to regurgitate chunks of my nearly-finished-thesis in response to a blog post, so here I go. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cool cartoon insect to have imaginary theoretical discussions with, so I have to resort to academic-speak. Sorry about that…

Some basic background points first:

1. The division between high and popular culture is historically constructed. The sacralisation of “high culture” as distinct from “low culture” began in the visual arts, moving on to music, opera, dance, and theatre much later. The “Brahmins”, having lost their hold on political power, barricaded themselves inside the museums and theatres and concentrated on cultural authority instead. Particularly in the United States, in ways that were more or less paralleled in Australia, the chaotically interactive and heterogeneous public theatres of the 18th and early 19th centuries became silent, sacred spaces, and the performances were reconfigured as equally sacred texts legible only to the educated few. BUT…this construction of the division between high and popular culture is incomplete and contested:
2. “Postmodern” artists and musicians (e.g. Warhol, Reich, Glass, and Riley) challenged and mocked the sacralisation and elitism of both traditional and modernist high culture, blurring the boundaries between Pop and Art
3. Avant-garde subcultures have always shared certain modes of expression, spaces, and political values with “underground” popular culture: a DIY ethic; a critical separation from, rather than an elevation above, the imagined “mainstream”; and an investment in the politics of cultural difference. Bernard Gendron’s book From Montmartre to the Mudd Club is a persuasive study of how this has played out in music cultures. Also, this is particularly the case in Australia where, unlike Europe, high modernism never managed to gain much power beyond the walls of the academy.
4. As the essays in the landmark collection High-Pop demonstrate, “big” high culture (opera, ballet, major museums) now shares the cultural space and some of the modes of marketing and distribution formerly restricted to the mass popular, giving us high-concept blockbusters, “design” collections in chainstores, massive outdoor opera events, and blockbuster museum exhibitions.

So what I think Anna has noticed in well-meaning cultural leftists’ critiques of high culture is the simplistic conflation of traditional highbrow culture’s undeniable elitism (opera: expensive, sacralised, consumed by those who occupy or aspire to a particular version of middle-class identity) on the one hand, with the avant-garde and popular underground’s aesthetic values of experimentation, difference, or shock on the other. There is a lot of leakage between the two (in terms of identity, values, and actual practitioners) and the academy provides spaces where they seem to belong together, but, as Anna points out, their “real world” economies and social functions are quite separate. So if artists feel they want to defend themselves against charges of “elitism” I guess that’s one way to do it. Another would be of course to ask how “elite” disabled, indigenous, or homeless artists might be considered to be.

But it isn’t that easy, if we are to be truly honest. In the end it is pretty much undeniable that despite the different politics of these various fields of cultural production (“big” high culture, the avant-garde, DIY subcultures), they have in common a desire to distance themselves from a particular kind of popular culture: commercially produced, widely consumed (by “other” people), and not considered to be politically or aesthetically valuable (depending on whether you care about aesthetics or politics more). For example, as part of my thesis I interviewed and surveyed people with all kinds of cultural tastes, from traditional high-brow to archly hip and cheerfully eclectic, and although they liked very different things, they all hated – you guessed it – McDonalds and Britney Spears. (“I love all music!…Oh, except for country. And heavy metal.”)

That, I think, puts a spanner in the works if you want to mount a defence against the attacks of those in cultural studies who take their populism seriously, and not ironically.

Back to the grind…