Low culture

In sociology, the term low culture identifies the forms of popular culture that have mass appeal, which is in contrast to the forms of high culture that appeal to a smaller proportion of the populace. Culture theory proposes that both high culture and low culture are subcultures within a society, because the culture industry mass-produces each type of popular culture for every socio-economic class.[5]

For the UK television website, see Lowculture.
Low culture humour:
Kissing the Pope's Feet
[1] German peasants bare their buttocks and fart in response to a papal bull of Pope Paul III: "The Pope speaks: Our sentences are to be feared, even if unjust. Response: Be damned! Behold, o furious race, our bared buttocks."[2]
The irreligious scene is low-culture humour from the Papstspotbilder (Depictions of the Papacy, 1545) series of wood cuts, by Lucas Cranach the Elder,[3] which was commissioned by Martin Luther.[4]

Standards and definitions

In Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (1958), Herbert J. Gans said that the:

Aesthetic standards of low culture stress substance, form being totally subservient, and there is no explicit concern with abstract ideas or even with fictional forms of contemporary social problems and issues. . . . Low culture emphasizes morality, but limits itself to familial and individual problems and [the] values, which apply to such problems. Low culture is content to depict traditional working class values winning out over the temptation to give into conflicting impulses and behavior patterns.

— Herbert Gans, [6]

Culture as social class

Each social class possess their own types of high-culture and of low-culture, the definition and content of which are determined by the socio-economic and educational particulars, the habitus of the people who compose a given social class. Therefore, what is high culture and what is low culture has specific meanings and usages collectively determined by the members of a social class.[7]

History

Physical artefacts from low culture are normally small, cheaply and often crudely made, in contrast to the often grand public art or luxury objects of high culture. The cheapness of the materials, many perishable, generally means that survival in modern times are rare. There are exceptions, especially in pottery and graffiti on stone. An ostracon is a small piece of pottery (or sometimes stone) which has been written on, for any of a number of purposes, among which curse tablets or more positive magical spells such as love magic are common. Wood must have been a common material, but only survives for long periods in certain climatic conditions, such as Egypt and other very arid areas, and permanently wet and slightly acid peat bogs.

Once printing (and paper) became relatively cheap, by the late Renaissance, popular prints became increasingly widespread, and cheap texts of street literature such as broadsides and sheets with broadside ballads, typically new topical words to a familiar tune. These became extremely common, but were treated as ephemera, so that survivals are few.

Much traditional folk music was only written down, and later mechanically recorded, in the 19th century, when nationalist sentiment in many countries made it of interest to middle class enthusiasts.

Mass media

Audience

All cultural products (especially high culture) have a certain demographic to which they appeal most. Low culture appeals to very simple and basic human needs plus offers a perceived return to innocence,[8] the escape from real world problems, or the experience of living vicariously through viewing someone else's life on television.[9]

Stereotypes

Low culture can be formulaic, employing trope conventions, stock characters and character archetypes in a manner that can be perceived as more simplistic, crude, emotive, unbalanced, or blunt compared to high culture's implementations—which may be perceived as more subtle, balanced, or refined and open for interpretations.

See also
  • Bogan – Unrefined or unsophisticated person (Australian and New Zealand slang) (Australia and New Zealand)
  • Literature – Written work of art
  • Bread and circuses – Figure of speech referring to a superficial means of appeasement
  • Cartoon – Type of two-dimensional visual art
  • Chav – Stereotype of anti-social youth dressed in sportswear (UK)
  • Cinema – Film industry comprising the technological and commercial institutions of filmmaking
  • Culture industry – Expression suggesting that popular culture is used to manipulate mass society into passivity
  • Dres – member of a Polish chav-like subculture that originated in the 1990s (Poland)
  • Flaite – Chilean urban lower-class youth (Chile)
  • Gopnik – Russian and Eastern European term for delinquent (Russia)
  • Skeet (Newfoundland) – pejorative epithet in Newfoundland English
  • Kitsch – Art or other objects that appeal to popular rather than high art tastes
  • Lowbrow (art movement) – Underground visual art movement
  • Mass society – society based on relations between huge numbers of people, whose prototypical denizen is the "mass man"
  • Middlebrow – Art qualification
  • Off-color humor – Americanism used to describe jokes of a vulgar nature
  • One-Dimensional Man-1964 book by Herbert Marcuse
  • Outsider art – Art created outside the boundaries of official culture by those untrained in the arts
  • Popular prints
  • Philistinism – Hostility to intellect, art and beauty
  • Tribal art, also known as Primitive art – Art made by the indigenous tribes
  • Prolefeed – Fictional language in the novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
  • Raunch culture – Book by Ariel Levy
  • Redneck – Derogatory term applied to white person from the rural South of the United States (United States)
  • Tabloid television
  • Toilet humour – Type of off-colour humour dealing with defecation, urination and flatulence
  • Trash culture – artistic or entertainment expressions considered of low cultural profile
  • Yellow journalism – Sensationalistic news

References
  1. The Latin title reads: "Hic oscula pedibus papae figuntur."
  2. In Latin and Italian, the caption concludes: "PAPA LOQVITUR. Sententiae nostrae etiam iniustae metuendae sunt. Responsio. Maledetta Aspice nudatas gens furiosa nates. Ecco qui Papa el mio belvedere."
  3. Oberman, Heiko Augustinus (1994). The Impact of the Reformation: Essays. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. p. 61. ISBN 978-0802807328.
  4. Edwards, Mark U. Jr. (2004). Luther's Last Battles: Politics And Polemics 1531-46. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Augsburg Fortress. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-8006-3735-4.
  5. Lane Crothers (2021). Globalization and American Popular Culture. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 48. ISBN 9781538142691.
  6. Gans, Herbert (1999) [1958]. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York City: Basic Books. p. 115. ISBN 978-0465026098.
  7. Gans, p. 07.
  8. Tomasino, Anna (2006). Discovering Popular Culture. London, England: Pearson Education. p. 211. ISBN 978-0321355966.
  9. Mazur, Eric; Koda, Tara K. (2000). "The Happiest Place on Earth: Disney's America and the Commodification of Religion". In Mazur, Eric; McCarthy, Kate (eds.). God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture. Abingdon, England: Routledge. p. 307. ISBN 978-0415485371.
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