Studies On The Aesthetic Characteristic In Popular Culture

From the beginning of the 1990s, the popular culture has spread out rapidly throughout China in line with China's Reforms and Opening up and the emergence of market economy. Soaked into each aspects of people's daily life and being an inseperable part of it, the popular culture has gradually impacted people's emotions and thoughts, altered our aesthetic values and played an decisive role in aesthetic trends. Meanwhile, the relavant studies on mass culture has aroused widespread attentions academically. As one of the most-concerned subjects in the field of humanities, it has attracted acholars'study at different levels and in various perspectives. Among them, the theories of the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School have made invaluable contributions. Mass culture studies in China, having undergone ups and downs, is demostrating a feature of openness. This thesis is focused on the studies of mass culture from the viewpoint of aesthetics and within the frame of three issues.Chap 1: the aesthetic trends of pop culture. First of all, a thorough and comprehensive re-cap is made on the complex concept of popular culture and a simple definition is given hereafter, followed by the analyses on the marital relation between the pop culture and the aesthetics, as well as the incentives behind the aesthetic trend towards the popular culture.Chap2: the analysis on the relation between the pop culture and the aesthetics. The mass media is a form of culture and the mass culture boasts a natural relation with the mass media, therefore the relation between mass media and the aesthetitcs becomes the forefront in the aesthetic studies towards mass culture, which not only deepens our understanding on mass culture's aesthetic trend but also ,by means of living aesthetic research, supplies great amonts of sensible materials to the aesthetics who benefits a healthy cultural environment thereby.Chap3: mainly case studies. An esthetic study is made on the two typical cultural forms in mass culture, namely, fashion cultuer and folk culture. These case studies bonds theory with practice and hence make my study more clarified and specified.Finally, on the basis of the studies brought up in the previous chapters, I proposed my opinion on popular culture study,i.e., the expectations on the aesthetic study of mass culture.