The report is due tomorrow.
The report is due by tomorrow. price tags the moral of the story is that snobs can be found in all areas of life they may be more annoying than helpful but they do serve a function in the modern clash over popular culture they help us understand the divide between high-brow and low-brow art and they remind us that art appreciation is a complex and subjective process
Critics and artists alike have become increasingly disheartened by the state of pop culture, especially the struggling film industry. Martin Scorsese has declared that MCU movies are more akin to theme parks than cinema, and former New York Times film critic AO Scott has left his job due to a lack of cultural space for original and ambitious work.
This tough talk about pop culture has been met with 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, in which one could gain social capital by hating unpopular and often corporately produced things.
Grady writes: “It used to be cool to hate stuff. Then came optimism, which celebrates the artistry of pop culture. But recently, the 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.”
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. Initially, snob meant of the ordinary or lower classes, typically folks lacking a college education. However, 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 of fresh and true ideas. In this way, critics could educate and humanize those 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 one couldn’t afford a ticket to the ballet, but one could read a mass-produced penny dreadful novel like Varney the Vampire; The Feast of Blood.
So, in one way, snobbery is a refined sense of aesthetic appreciation - the challenge is to produce high quality art. On the other hand, snobbery has long involved the upper class using culture to signify superiority.
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 one makes the mistake of asking for a recommendation, one usually receives a response like this.
A 2001 study found that connoisseurs failed to distinguish between red wine and white wine dyed red. They also rated wines more highly when they came in fancier bottles or higher price tags.
The moral of the story is that snobs can be found in all areas of life. They may be more annoying than helpful, but they do serve a function in the modern clash over popular culture. They help us understand the divide between high-brow and low-brow art, and they remind us that art appreciation is a complex and subjective process.