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 »
Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mot...her fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lowest form of popular culture--lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reali...ty of most people's lives--has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple ...of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The eating of a MacDonald's meal is like the reading of Reader's Digest--small, easily digested, carefully processed, carefully cu...t down, abridged. Reader's Digest gives us knowledge that is easily compartmentalized, simplified, ideologically sound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Guided by emotion and empathy, working through ritual and repetition, television's core vocabulary reflects its role as a therapeu...tic voice ministering to the open wounds of the psyche. As a "close-up" medium whose dramatic and social locus is the home, television addresses the inner life by minimizing the heroic while maximizing the private and personal aspects of existence. Where motion pictures favor the panoramic shot, tele vision privileges the zoom shot, looking in rather than out. To represent conversation, film directors use the "shot-counter-shot" effect while television directors employ the tightly constructed "two faces east." Thus motion-picture conversation emphasizes the separations between people, while television depicts people as closely linked to one another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »