Popular Culture Values and the Arts: Essays on Elitism versus Democratization.

Edited by Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland, June 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-0-7864-3944-7, $39.95. 230 pages.

Review by Stephen Gennaro, York University, Toronto

In their current collection of essays, Popular Culture Values and the Arts: Essays on Elitism versus Democratization, editors Ray Browne and Lawrence Kreiser Jr. examine the question, is art democratic? More precisely, the collection seeks to explore if the interpretation of art is (or can be) a democratic process, or if “the full range and depth of the arts and aesthetics should be left with and controlled by the elite in power” (21). In order to do so, the editors provide the reader with a collection of thirteen essays , divided into five sections, which further illuminate the history of folk , high, and low (popular) culture and the role that technological and socio-cultural changes have played in the democratization of the arts; that is, the process by which art, as a communicator of ideas, values, ideologies, and expressions of the surroundings in which it is created, is made available to all—or restricted in access.

In examining the relationship between the high/low divide, Browne and Kreiser are participating in a larger discussion in academia that continues to assess (and re-assess) the value of this type of binary distinction in the study of popular culture. The popularity of the Birmingham School’s adaptation of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony over the last quarter century has created a widely recognized interpretation of the relationship between the individual and the culture industries, which accounts for the agency of the individual even in the midst of a mass consumer society. According to recent work in the field of Cultural Studies, the text is not a site of domination, nor is it a site for the reproduction of dominant ideologies. Rather, the text is viewed as a meeting place where meaning is negotiated (and re-negotiated) between the dominant ideologies of production and the active agents of consumption. This optimistic approach to the relationship between the individual and the culture industries provides the readers, viewers, and consumers the agency to resist, subvert, or accept the text’s explicit and implicit ideologies, and has replaced earlier discourses of the dangers of mass society, which were often entangled in larger and more problematic representations of power and privilege through its use of terms such as high (elite) and low (popular or folk) culture.

One of the interesting ways that Browne and Kreiser’s collection of essays attempts to deal with the high/low divide is to problematize the binary by suggesting that the categories for research and appreciation are actually three-fold; and that popular and folk culture, both categories often grouped into the meta-category of low culture, are each deserving of their own “space.” As such, the collection of essays attempts to provide spaces for discussing popular and folk culture as separate entities, and does so quite successfully in the first three sections of the book on “Folk Roots,” “Developing the Oversized Spirit,” and “Breaking the Cast” through an examination of both the current American society and its historical roots. The collection is less successful in providing a space for critiquing the high/low divide in the last two sections of the book, “Promoting the American (and World) Dream” and “Outsider Views of American Cultures,” which deal more specifically with the imperialistic elements of American popular culture and in many ways buy directly into the very elements of the high/low dichotomy that the collection seeks to problematize.

The discussions surrounding American popular culture found in the last two sections of the book are the low point of this collection and take away from the excellent insight to be gained in the scholarship of high, low, and folk, culture that the first ten essays offer the reader. For starters, the pieces chosen for the discussion of American popular culture do not appear to fit with the earlier themes of the collection. Whereas earlier pieces such as Urish’s “Cultural Aesthetics: Anthropology and the (In) Visible Values of “Art” or Crawford’s “Who Gets to Play? The Hegemony of Copyright and Trademark in Art and Popular Culture” are well-written, thoughtful pieces that not only survey the field of contemporary scholarship but then add to that with insightful case studies, essays such as Batchelor’s “Selling Culture to the People: Advertising, Marketing, and Public Relations in a Changing World” appear lacking in scholarship. The article is grounded in generalizations and assumptions and fails to connect with any existing work in the field. For example, within Batchelor’s discussion of advertising and marketing as education, he quote’s Irene Costera Meijer’s use of the term “positive realism” and then proceeds to uses it as an anchoring term for his own work. However, nowhere in either the text, or the notes to the essay is there any discussion of how Costera Meijer borrows this term from advertising historian and cultural critic Michael Schudson’s work on “capitalist realism.” Equally frustrating is how Batchelor grounds his discussion of the current social role of advertising on Christopher Lasch’s 1991 work The Culture of Narcissism, and Batchelor’s referring to Lasch as the “brilliant cultural historian” (177). Missing from Batchelor’s piece is any reference to the significant amount of work over the last eighteen years in this field by scholars such as Kellner, Giroux, or McChesney, just to name a few.

Despite these weaknesses late in the volume, this collection can and should be viewed as an excellent resource for scholars interested in folk art, visual arts, popular culture, the high/low divide, and democracy. The collection provides the reader with a current and thought-provoking discussion of the connection between art and democracy, grounded in an excellent history of the relationship between the two entities. Whether it is Browne and Kreiser’s excellent essay “Garden of the Folk Arts” or Neal’s extremely well-thought-out discussion of “Values, Popular Culture and Social Change,” the collection explores the subject of the democratization of arts from multiple disciplines and a variety of viewpoints and only really falls short of its mandate, to “outline some, though not all, [of the] battlefields between the cultures in control and those in rebellion, in art enjoyment” (31), in the last two sections where the essays appear more interested in re-affirming the high/low divide than in discussing the spaces for both enjoyment and resistance