The website provides a helpful tool
The website offers a useful tool. labeled with higher prices this suggests that snobs are often clueless and that they can have a negative impact on culture by making it harder to access by raising prices and by creating a false sense of superiority
Critics and artists alike are increasingly pessimistic about the state of pop culture, especially the struggling film industry. Martin Scorsese declared that MCU movies are more like theme parks than cinema, while AO Scott, former New York Times film critic, is leaving his job because he felt there was no longer any cultural space for original and ambitious work. This tough talk about pop culture has led to a backlash, best embodied by the “let people enjoy things” meme. This pushback reflects something commentators call “optimism”, meaning the optimistic celebration of popular culture, especially pop music. Vox correspondent Constance Grady notes that throughout the 2000s, there was an era of extreme snark, a continuation of the 90s anti-sellout culture in which one could gain social capital by hating unpopular and often corporately produced things. “Well, that’s unfortunate,” she writes, “because it’s sexist. It used to be cool to hate stuff, then came optimism which celebrates the artistry of pop culture, but recently opposition between those who decry pop culture and those who revel in it has become testy and increasingly critics or artists who hate on pop culture are called ‘snobs’, which makes us wonder: what is the function of snobs today? Are snobs just haters who want to infringe on my God-given right to enjoy watching Tony Stark eat shwarma? Would we be better off without them, or do they serve a cultural function? Let’s find out in this wisecrack edition: do we need snobs in order to understand the modern clash over popular culture and snobbery?
We first need to understand the 19th century origin of the wall between pop culture and high culture. The word “snob” initially meant of the ordinary or lower classes, typically folks lacking a college education, though the meaning has flipped today with snobbery now associated with consumers of highbrow art. Its association with class remains strong. English poet and social critic Matthew Arnold is often considered to have founded the study of high culture versus pop culture. He was hostile to the latter, wanting his compatriots to aim higher than the commercial culture that thrived in taverns, which he compared to anarchy. Arnold believed that art criticism should be a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world and thus to establish a current fresh and true ideas. In this way, critics could educate and humanize folks whom Arnold pretty rudely called the Philistines.
Importantly, with the rise of mass industrialization and commercial culture, pop culture would be defined by financial accessibility. Maybe you couldn’t afford a ticket to the ballet, but you could read a mass-produced penny dreadful novel like Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood. So, in one way, snobbery is a refined sense of aesthetic appreciation. The challenge is culture to produce high quality art.
On the other hand, snobbery is long involved the upper class using culture to signify superiority. So, which view is right? Philosopher Matthew Kieran characterizes snobs as more concerned about seeming cultured and intelligent than about engaging with actual work. He claims that a snobbish judgment or response is one where aesthetically irrelevant social features play a causal role in the subject’s appreciative activity and coming to judge the value of an aesthetic object. In layman’s terms, a snob is a poser who uses high-class signifiers not because they like them, but because saying they do affords them social currency. Consider the wine snob: if you make the mistake of asking for a recommendation, you usually receive a response like this.
A 2001 study in which connoisseurs failed to distinguish between red wine and white wine dyed red also rated wines more highly when they came in fancier bottles or were labeled with higher prices. This suggests that snobs are often clueless and that they can have a negative impact on culture by making it harder to access, by raising prices, and by creating a false sense of superiority.