Joyous Poetics: The Aesthetic Imagination Of The Popular Culture In An Age Of Consumption

There should be no doubt that culture is an industry. The mass culture specifically refers to the cultural products produced by the industry of culture since the twentieth century, such as films, advertisements, popular music, common novels, and TV programs. The industry of culture can hardly be detached from the mass culture. So all the disadvantages of the industry of culture, the vulgar mediocre content and the curry favor with popularity, in particular, are likely to be the problems of mass culture. Though with its fundamental shortcomings, mass culture, because of the existence of its historical retionalization, can noe be got rid of by force. People can only keep an attitude of cultural criticism toward the mass culture.A set of cultural values and ideas that arise from common exposure of a population to the same cultural activities, communications media, music and art, etc. Mass culture becomes possible only with modern communications and electronic media. A mass culture is transmitted to individuals, rather than arising from people's daily interactions, and therefore lacks the distinctive content of cultures rooted in community and region. Mass culture tends to reproduce the liberal value of individualism and to foster a view of the citizen as consumer.Intellectual opinions of popular culture, the culture of the masses, have been deeply shaped by critical theory. Since the Frankfurt School, which identified with the 'high culture' of the intellectual classes, popular culture has been seen as trivial, demeaning and commercialized, serving the interests of the capitalist system. Post-modernist theorists, however, no longer accept the belief that there is some objectively superior high culture setting a standard from which to make evaluations of others. They have been more interested in popular culture as representing the voices of the previously silent, and by adopting the methods of film analysis or literary criticism they examine the way popular culture is produced and the underlying assumptions upon which its meaning rests.A sociology developed by the Frankfurt school that is influenced by divergent intellectual ideas, including Marxism and psychoanalysis. It starts from two principles: opposition to the status quo and the idea that history can be potentially progressive. Together these principles imply a position from which to make judgments of human activity (rather than just describing)...