pop culture and the culture industry

1. Pop Culture and the
Culture Industry
PREPARED BY: MARIA MERLLAN E. MIER, LPT

2. Oxford Dictionary defines Art as “The expression or application of
human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as
painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for
their beauty or emotional power and Works produced by human creative
skill and imagination”.

3. John Story
 ‘Cultural Theory and Popular Culture’ defines Culture and Popular Culture as
“the works and practices intellectual and artistic activity, the texts and
practices whose principal function is to signify, to produce or to be the
occasion for the production of meaning.
 This Definition of Culture is synonymous with what structuralists and post-
structuralists call ‘signifying practices’, or Pop Culture, would allow us to
speak of soap opera, pop music, and comics, as examples of culture. These
are usually referred to as texts”.

4. Six sub-definitions of Popular Culture
1) Culture that is popular
2) Culture that is not high culture
3) Culture is mass culture
4) Culture is culture of the people
5) Culture is Hegemony
6) Culture refers to Postmodernism

5. Culture that is popular
 liked by many by quantitive means, for example album sales, plays on
the radio, attendance at screenings or concerts and audience ratings
on television shows.
Culture that is not high culture
 this definition would be considering all art and media that is not
deemed as ‘Art’ in certain societies.
 Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu states that the cultural definition of not
high culture functions as a marker of social and economic class,
though in contemporary times the line for this definition becomes a
little blurred.

6. Culture is mass culture
 mass is the key word in this definition as it applies to the mass of
society, and mass production and consumption of this culture.
Culture is culture of the people
 defined as the authentic culture of the people or the working class, in
the past also known as ‘Folk Culture’.
 Rock or Punk bands could be defined under this category of making
authentic art of the people.

7. Culture is Hegemony
 culture that uses the site of struggle between the economic and social
lower class to those of a much higher social and economic
demographic or an area of compromise between the two, where the
dominant, subservient and oppositional cultural value are mixed
dependent on what message they are conveying in the culture.
Culture refers to Postmodernism
 culture that no longer notices the distinction between high and low
art, some are celebratory of the end of high art and the divide other
are despaired by the achievement of commerce over culture.
 Also known as a culture to critique, to analyze and examine an
argument or question.
 Popular Culture is a site where everyday life can be examined
therefore critiqued. The following section examines an opening
sequence of Pop Culture TV show The Simpsons, created by
Postmodern street artist Banksy, as an example of this critique.