Folk Art grew from below. It was a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without ...the benefit of High Culture, to suit their own needs. Mass Culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying.... Folk Art was the people's own institution, their private little garden walled off from the great formal park of their masters' High Culture. But Mass Culture breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into a debased form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of political domination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And the ambitious vine Crowns with his purple mass... The cedar reaching high To kiss the sky, The cypress, pine, And useful sassafras.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two more contrabands yesterday. These runaways are bright fellows. As a body they are superior to the average of the uneducated wh...ite population of this State. More intelligent, I feel confident. What a good-for-nothing people the mass of these western Virginians are! Unenterprising, lazy, narrow, listless, and ignorant. Careless of consequences to the country if their own lives and property are safe. Slavery leaves one class, the wealthy, with leisure for cultivation. They are usually intelligent, well-bred, brave, and high-spirited. The rest are serfs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Consider the relationship of Hollywood and Broadway. In the twenties, the two were sharply differentiated, movies being produced f...or the masses of the hinterland, theatre for an upper-class New York audience. The theatre was High Culture, mostly of the Academic variety (Theatre Guild) but with some spark of Avant-garde fire (the "little" or "experimental" theatre movement). The movies were definitely Mass Culture, mostly very bad but with some leaven of Avant-gardism (Griffiths, Stroheim) and Folk Art (Chaplin and other comedians). With the sound film, Broadway and Hollywood drew closer together. Plays are now produced mainly to sell the movie rights, with many being directly financed by the film companies. The merger has standardized the theatre to such an extent that even the early Theatre Guild seems vital in retrospect, while hardly a trace of the "experimental" theatre is left. And what have the movies gained? They are more sophisticated, the acting is subtler, the sets in better taste. But they too have become standardized: they are never as awful as they often were in the old days, but they are never as good either. They are better entertainment and worse art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like the international avant-garde, rock-and-roll is the creative product of a rebellious youth culture trying to reach a mass aud...ience. Its artists embrace technological innovation. Their lives and personal styles are often counterculture. Many rock groups have appropriated creative strategies of modern art history: Some stage acts can be seen as Neo-Dada performance, others have lifted ideas from the Surrealists, the Situationists, and other art groups. Although pop music has its individual stars like Elvis and Madonna, most rock musicians, like the international avant-garde, work collaboratively, in bands. But however much a rock-and-roll group may initially appeal to a specific youth subculture, its potential for vast global audiences is different from that of fine art, which remains within the arcane reaches of high culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We soon after saw a splendid yellow lily (Lilium canadense) by the shore, which I plucked. It was six feet high, and had twelve fl...owers, in two whorls, forming a pyramid, such as I have seen in Concord. We afterward saw many more thus tall along this stream, and also still more numerous on the East Branch, and, on the latter, one which I thought approached yet nearer to the Lilium superbum. The Indian asked what we called it, and said that the "loots" (roots) were good for soup, that is, to cook with meat, to thicken it, taking the place of flower. They get them in the fall. I dug some, and found a mass of bulbs pretty deep in the earth, two inches in diameter, looking, and even tasting, somewhat like raw green corn on the ear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy ruptu...re, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank,--for the sun acts on one side first,--and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,--had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (leibo, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; lobos, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally, a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single-lobed, or B, double-lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the gutteral g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feather and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Spacious Firmament on high, With all the blue Ethereal Sky,... And spangled Heav'ns, a Shining Frame, Their great Original proclaim: Th' unwearied Sun, from day to day, Does his Creator's Pow'r display, And publishes to every Land The Work of an Almighty Hand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted b...y audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator's lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dangers of mass culture are much easier to define than the ideals. The foremost one, which may negate all the ideals, is an ov...erpowering narcotic effect, relaxing the tired mind and tranquilizing the anxious. Genuine art is demanding and difficult, often unpleasant, nagging at the mind and stretching the nerves taut. So much of mass culture envelops the audience in a warm bath, making no demands except that we all glow with pleasure and comfort. It is this that may negate the range of possibility (the bath is warmer at the shallow end), keep taste static or even deteriorate it a little, muffle the few critical and ironic sounds being made. That premature cultural critic Homer knew all about this effect, at various times calling it Lotus Eaters, Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens, and he just barely got our hero through intact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »