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 art is dominated throughout by the star system, not only in its actors but in all its elements, whatever the medium. Every... work of art, to be sure, has its dominant elements, to which the rest are subordinate. But in popular art it is the dominant ones alone that are the objects of interest, the ground of its satisfaction. By contrast, great art is in this sense pointless; everything in it is significant, everything makes its own contribution to the aesthetic substance. The domain of popular art is, paradoxically, an aristocracy, as it were: some few elements are singled out as the carriers of whatever meaning the work has while the rest are submerged into an anonymous mass. The life of the country is reduced to the mannered gestures of its king. It is this that gives the effect of simplification and standardization.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 »
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff... That beetles o'er his base into the sea, And there assume some other horrible form Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason, And draw you into madness?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better not try to digest anything stronger....... a writer of popular sketches in magazines; a lecturer before Lyceums and College societies; a dabbler in metaphysics, poetry, and art, than which I would rather die, for if it has come to that, alas! verily, as you say, mediocrity has fallen on the name of Adams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What gave peculiar sanctity to numbers? Why were a million people, who all resembled each other, any way more interesting than one... person? What aspiration could she help to put into the mind of this great million-armed monster that would make it worth her love or respect? Religion? A thousand powerful churches were doing their best, and she could see no chance for a new faith of which she was to be the inspired prophet. Ambition? High popular ideals? Passion for whatever is lofty and pure? The very words irritated her.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Resorts advertised for waitresses, specifying that they "must appear in short clothes or no engagement." Below a Gospel Guide colu...mn headed, "Where our Local Divines Will Hang Out Tomorrow," was an account of spirited gun play at the Bon Ton. In Jeff Winney's California Concert Hall, patrons "bucked the tiger" under the watchful eye of Kitty Crawhurst, popular "lady" gambler.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is said the city was spared a golden-oak period because its residents, lacking money to buy the popular atrocities of the ninet...ies, necessarily clung to their rosewood and mahogany.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into the ...heritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony--unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe's declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »