Popular Culture and High Culture Quotes

“postscript”
― Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation Of Taste

“At one level, the critique is a plea for an ideal way of life guided by the humanist dictates of high culture that emerged during the Enlightenment and by the standards of humanist thinkers who place a high value on personal autonomy, individual creativity, and the rejection of group norms. These standards are undoubtedly conducive to the creation of high culture, but whether they ought to guide everyone and be applied on a society-wide basis is open to question.”
― Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation Of Taste

“In both instances, advocates of one culture view the other with different standards, disapproving of what they find, and expressing their disapproval by alleging harmful effects on the audience. Why they do this, why their standards differ, which standards are the right ones, and how this affects the evaluation of high and popular culture will be discussed in Chapters Two and Three.”
― Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation Of Taste

“methods of attack, however; whereas high culture expresses its disapproval of popular culture mainly in books and literary journals, popular culture publics also use the police, the pulpit, and the political arena to attack their enemies.”
― Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation Of Taste

“The same process occurs, however, when people who prefer popular culture come into contact with high culture; they are frequently shocked by its espousal of “deviant” behavior, especially on the part of the artist, and they condemn it in terms similar to those in the mass culture critique. For example, during the 1960s, cultural and political satire was often called “sick comedy,” and Lenny Bruce was hounded off the stage and into suicide by the police and the courts. The defenders of high and popular culture attack each other in many ways. High culture condemns popular culture as vulgar and pathological, while popular culture attacks high culture for being overly intellectual, snobbish, and effeminate, inventing pejorative terms like “highbrow” and “egghead” for this purpose.”
― Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation Of Taste

“at least one conclusion about their effects can be suggested: that a sizeable difference exists between the media effects postulated by the critics of mass culture and those discovered by empirical research. As a result, it would appear that the critics are making unwarranted inferences about the extent, intensity, and harmfulness of media effects; because they dislike media content and popular culture generally, they come to it with the aesthetic standards of high culture”
― Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation Of Taste