Elitist Art, Unpopular Art and Popular Art
- The "greatness" of a work of art is roughly held to be proportional to two factors: insight into the human condition; skills at the medium that this insight employs.
- These two factors are not independent.
- Often the most profound truths require skills that most people don't have; if you don't have those skills, no matter how profound the truth that you discovered, noone else will ever be able to appreciate it.
- Insight benefits greatly from the company of others who have similar insights; and skills benefit greatly from the company of others who have those skills. This is called "education" (and it is actually two different kinds of education, one about thinking and the other one about articulating).
- Unfortunately, only an elite acquires the highest education.
- Hence the greatest doses of insight are to be found in elitist art.
- The voice of the lower classes is not heard in elitist art despite the fact that the low classes constitute the vast majority of us.
- Even the beneficiaries of the greatest art tend to be an elite.
- Elitist ("high") art expresses the "truths" discovered by an elite (e.g. of writers) to an elite (of readers).
- There is a world, all that exists outside minds, and that is "reality".
- There is also that which exists inside minds and not outside them, "beyond-reality".
- A mind not only perceives reality but also "imagines" beyond it.
- A creative process called Science discovers, documents and dissects reality.
- A creative process called Art has to do with beyond-reality.
- Science enables technology.
- Technology invents the future of the relationship between mind and reality.
- There are several layers of Art, in particular there is "elitist" art (sanctioned by the art establishment, whether critics, historians, orchestras, museums or literary prizes) and there is "popular" art (comic strips, Hollywood movies, pop music).
- Elitist art is not about beauty but about the insight into the human condition. Elitist art was sometimes meant as education of the masses (e.g. church music) or realistic description (e.g. portraiture) but today it is considered high art only if it also provides that insight.
- Usually classified within popular art, there is also "unpopular" art (for example, alternative rock, free jazz and avantgarde music).
- Elitist art enables unpopular art.
- "Unpopular art" invents the future of the relationship between mind and beyond-reality.
- Technology bridges the gap between present and future. Unpopular art bridges a similar gap.
- These intermediate levels turn the profound truths discovered by Art and Science into ordinary lives.
- Both technology and unpopular art shed commercial products.
- The commercial products that derive from unpopular art constitute popular art.
- "Popular science" is not the equivalent of "popular art".
- The equivalent of "popular art" would be products such as soft drinks and toothpaste.
- Popular culture yields not artistic insight but entertainment.
- Products yields not scientific insight but practical usefulness.
- Authorship is lost because these products are made in assembly lines, and ultimately it is capital that decides what deserves to exist and what not.
- Science is transient: scientific truth changes all the time as mind keeps discovering new facts about reality.
- Technology is transient: it changes as science changes.
- Elitist art is transient too: it changes all the time as mind keeps imagining "beyond-reality".
- Unpopular art is transient too: it changes as elitist art changes (and frequently unpopular art becomes elitist art for later generations).
- They are all manifestations of the fact that human culture is fundamentally transient, doomed to keep changing forever, never achieving a state of equilibrium.
- Technology and popular art create mass culture.
- Indulging in technology or popular art is a way to avoid "insight" and still benefit from other people's "insight".
- That insight comes with a cost: uncertainty, doubt and anxiety about the ultimate truth, an elusive truth that is unreachable and that causes reevaluation and, in the end, progress in elitist culture, i.e. in both Science and Art (progress is a side-effect of the failure to reach the truth).
- Mass culture is a way to escape from the psychological suffering that comes with that insight into the human condition, an escape alternative to the one preached by world religions. Mass culture is a modern invention to escape from existential anguish.
- Mass culture is nonetheless influenced by that "progress", except that progress of elitist culture is replaced with continuously changing fashion in mass culture.
- Public opinion is public ignorance.
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