ABSTRACT
Popular culture, almost by definition, is shallow. Designed for a very wide swath of the population, it must stay at a low level of sophistication to appeal to as many consumers as possible. If you cannot assume your audience has advanced schooling, or knowledge about, say, the opera, the symphony, playwrights, or drama, then you cannot engage in references to esoteric subjects or complex philosophical ideas. Modern popular culture is designed for the broad public with a commercial interest in mind; the desire is to entertain, not to educate or stimulate. It is not designed to embody or express deep philosophy or be similar in stylistic form to the fine arts. We speak of Baroque painting, but not in any serious way of Baroque footwear, except in a loose metaphorical sense about a busy and messy shoe. The history of European painting comprised of Baroque, Mannerist, or Rococo styling is not, by and large, applied to the history of footwear. Nor would reasonable scholarship attend to similarities between, say, one of the world’s great novels, Don Quixote, and the Rambo films starring Sylvester Stallone. Children’s toys are understood to perform socialization functions, but not particularly to embody some of the finer points of complex philosophy and religious dogma. Nor are cultural objects all of the same aesthetic value, either. Baroque paintings are different from Baroque sneakers; Rambo films are B-movies whereas Cervantes’s novel is a great work of art; and toys are toys, and certainly philosophy is philosophy. As Kipling might have said: Art is art and popular culture is popular culture.
