After a lapse in blogging I think I want to qualify all of my previous posts as not worth reading. So I am going to start over.

The divide between authenticity and popularization, substance and mass culture, and art and democracy has been on my mind as of late. Because of the culture I am active in (punk, d.i.y., criticism) I've found myself defending what sometimes seems to me like the "virtue of elitism" (because of the (self-) marginalized nature of these things) ; this is an idea I am not entirely comfortable with so I am writing now to try and more neatly weigh culturally democratic ideals against quality, and content in aesthetics and ideas.

A conversation I had recently with a friend shed some light on this conflict between democratization/popularization of culture and its decrease in substance. There seems to be a correlation between the complexity, and depth of a work of "art" (a film, piece of music or a painting) and its relative low rate of consumption (how marginalized or unnoticed is the work). This is not a merely a division between "high" and "low" creative works but rather a product of the "laboriousness" of even the artist's work in mass society; even the artist is reduced to using the work of his hands for basic needs fulfillment. Patronage, to the extent that it is still a factor in the process of art's production in our time, is not oriented to mass society's needs. In order to satisfy the greatest number of people with a single work it must be easy to relate to. A result of this, what is essentially marketing strategy, is that creative acts cater to the lowest common denominator in an attempt to draw in the most people.

Mass society demands mass production in its culture. In North America universally available film, and music especially are something like democratic ideals; they are symbolic of a "post-class" based society where people are not bound to a system of cultural stratification correlative to their class. The culture generating machines of late-capital work as best they can to produce easily relatable, universally accessible works so that all people's have at their fingertips the privilege of communing (emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, etc.) with the fabrication of human hands (art?) The naive truth to this democratic perception of media/art is that, yes, elements off the American cultural landscape are in fact accessible by all peoples. The democratization of culture then maintains a paradoxical relationship to its goals of providing the necessary fabrication for mediation of emotional, psychological, symbolic, or spiritual experience.

The paradox is that the substance of the universalized product, the democratically ideal work of art, is fundamentally altered. There seem to be two poles to this alteration. At one pole there is a movement toward the melodramatic: the creation of situations, characters, or things that are spectacularly emotional that put to use nostalgic, sentimental symbolic devices for almost reflexive response. These works are supersaturated with "meaning" and tend to venture into the realm of cliche: the easily relatable situations of love, loss, regret, revenge, etc., that apparently we all "experience". At the other pole is the absence of meaning. These works play on, again, reflexive responses to spectacular or comedic images: pain, explosions, etc. Rather than unique or individual relation to particularly constructed works demanding thought provoking, complex interpretive relation they play on reflexes and cliche.

To be continued later with:

-authentic relation to the image/art/sound/etc.
-subaltern or marginalized culture