What's the Topic? High and low culture

For an intelligent and balanced view of the popular culture versus high culture debate we need look no further than Raymond Williams. Writing in the early 1960s he unearths most of the important questions and particularly these two:

Isn’t there great danger of the tradition of high culture being overwhelmed by mass culture, which expresses the tastes and standards of the ordinary man?

Is the tradition of high culture simply received and used by a particular social minority, which will indeed often add to it certain works and habits of its own?

Men differ in their capacities for excellence. Yet democracy insists that everyone has an equal right to judge. Aren’t we seeing, in our own time, the results of this contradiction? Isn’t there great danger of the tradition of high culture being overwhelmed by mass culture, which expresses the tastes and standards of the ordinary man? Isn’t it really our first duty to defend minority culture, which in its actual works is the highest achievement of humanity?

The difficulty here is that ‘minority culture’ can mean two things. It can mean the work of the great artists and thinkers, and of the many lesser but still important figures who sustain them. It can mean also the work of these men as received and used by a particular social minority, which will indeed often add to it certain works and habits of its own.

The great tradition is in many ways a common inheritance, and it has been the purpose of the best of modern education to make it as widely available as possible. Certainly this extension is never as easy as some people expect. Certainly it often happens that in the attempt to make difficult work more widely available, part of the value of the work is lost. Perhaps the whole attempt is wrongly conceived, and we should concentrate instead on maintaining the high tradition in its own terms.

The question is, however, can this in any case be done. The work of the great artists and thinkers has never been confined to their own company; it has always been made available to some others. And doesn’t it often happen that those to whom it has been made available identify the tradition with themselves, grafting it into their own way of life? Thus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, Rattigan may be a true succession, or it may not. The latest terms are always subject to error. Not every man under the towers of Oxford or Cambridge is the fellow of Cranmer, Newman, and Arnold, and these names cannot really be used to show that he is doing more important work, belongs more to the high tradition, than a teacher in a school at Croydon or a writer on the remote island of Jura. Yet, again and again, particular minorities confuse the superiority of the tradition which has been made available to them with their own superiority, an association which the passing of time or of frontiers can make suddenly ludicrous. We must always be careful to distinguish the great works of the past from the social minority which at a particular place and time identifies itself with them.

The great tradition very often continues itself in quite unexpected ways. Much new work, in the past, has been called ‘low’, in terms of the ‘high’ standards of the day. This happened to much of our Elizabethan drama, and to the novel in the eighteenth century. Looking back, we can understand this because in each case the society was changing in fundamental ways. The minorities which assumed that they alone had the inheritance and guardianship of the great tradition in fact turned out to be wrong. This mistake can happen at any time. In our own century, there are such new forms as the film, the musical, and jazz. Each of these has been seen as ‘low’, a threat to ‘our’ standards. Yet during the period in which films have been made, there have been as many major contributions, in film, to the world’s dramatic tradition, as there have been major plays. Of course most films are nowhere near this level. But from the past we have only the best work, and we can properly compare with this only our own best work. Some forms may well be better than others, in that they contain much greater possibilities for the artist, but this cannot be settled until there has been time for development. The great period of the novel came more than a century after the form had become popular and had been dismissed a ‘low’. It realized possibilities which nobody could then have foreseen. The prestige of an old form is never decisive. There is no reason, today, why a science-fiction story should be thought less serious than an historical novel, or a new musical than a naturalist play. ‘Low’ equals ‘unfamiliar’ is one of the perennial cultural traps, and it is fallen into most easily by those who assume that in their own persons, in their own learned tastes and habits, they are the high tradition.

This might be agreed, but does it go to the real issue? These mistakes are made, but new minorities set them right. Still, however, they are minorities. Most people are not interested in the great tradition, old or new. Most people are not interested in art, but merely in entertainment. Actual popular taste is for such things as variety, the circus, sport, and processions. Why force art on such people, especially since you will be in danger of reducing art to that level, mixing it up with the popular and commercial worlds? Wouldn’t your effort be better spent on maintaining real art for those who value it?

This distinction between art and entertainment may be much more difficult to maintain than it looks. At its extremes, of course, it is obvious. But over the whole range, is there any easy and absolute distinction? Great art can give us deep and lasting experiences, but the experience we get from many things that we rightly call art is quite often light and temporary. The excitement of the circus, the procession, the variety sketch, can be quite easily forgotten, but at the time it is often intense. Sport, in our century, has become a popular spectacle: its excitements again are intense and often temporary. There may be a difference between such things and the minor decorative arts, the passing comedies, the fashionable artistic performer, but can it really be seen as a difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’? And even where the difference seems absolute, what follows from this? What has to be shown, to sustain the argument that ‘high culture’ is in danger of being overwhelmed by ‘mass culture’, is that there is not only difference but conflict. Most of us can test this in our own experience. For, in fact, we do not live in these neatly separated worlds. Many of us go one day to a circus, one day to a theatre; one day to the football, one day to a concert. The experiences are different, and vary widely in quality both between and within themselves. Do we in fact feel that our capacity for any one of these things is affected by our use of the others?

(Williams 1966: 109–11) What's Next?

Williams’s ideas of what constitutes popular entertainment have dated. Update the list that runs ‘Actual popular taste is for such things as variety, the circus, sport, and processions’. From your new list choose individual items which you consider make this ‘distinction between art and entertainment… much more difficult to maintain’.