Posted: April 24th, 2025

Social Science – Sociology unit 3 assignment

You are required to number your responses, submit your work as a PDF, and to be detailed and thorough in all your responses. I expect it will take at least one paragraph to answer each question. I strongly recommend you review the Helpful Hints under the Welcome Aboard! folder before completing this assignment to make sure you are following all the directions.

1. Write a short summary of “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark” and explain how it is relevant to the material we covered in this unit.

2. Where should sociologists focus their study: high culture or popular culture? Why?

3. Apply some of the theories from cultural sociology that we have learned thus far to explain the origin, production, and reception of some new form of music or new genre of television. Who are the creators, who are the receivers, and what is their relationship to the social world? What insitutions mediate the connection between the creators/receivers and the social world?

4. Many school districts in Texas have been banning books recently. Read up on this unfolding story at

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-books-race-sexuality-schools-rcna13886Links to an external site.

and do some research on your own about this issue. Drawing on your knowledge of cultural sociology, explain both the pros and cons of this censorship. 

the $12 stuffed million shark: https://books.google.com/books?id=ORHdSqeDPlsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+$12+Million+Stuffed+Shark:+The+Curious+Economics+of+Contemporary+Art&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bpSdVN2_NIijNpung_gC&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20%2412%20Million%20Stuffed%20Shark%3A%20The%20Curious%20Economics%20of%20Contemporary%20Art&f=false

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041492941/jens-haaning-kunsten-take-the-money-and-run-art-denmark-blank

tedtalk: https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_strickler_nfts_the_metaverse_and_the_future_of_digital_art

Jennifer L. Graves, M.A.

High, Popular & Low Culture

Introduction

Introduction

There are various understandings of high culture, mass culture, popular culture and low culture and how they impact our everyday activities.

We will try to unpack the means by which everyday life might be influenced by both art and popular culture and how everyday life impacts them.

Everyday practices impinge as much upon the apparently elevated world of art as on the world of popular culture.

Whether there really is genuinely something known as high culture that is superior to other forms of culture is a matter of great debate.

Best of Human Achievements vs. Trick Perpetrated by Social Elites

Outline
Look at the claims made for seeing high culture and art as extraordinary and involving ideas, values and responses that are above and superior to mundane concerns.
Examine how popular culture can be regarded as effecting everyday life.
Consider how viewers and readers may actually respond in everyday settings to mass media products.
Look at how we can see the world of art as thoroughly wrapped up in everyday concerns and practices.
Look at how cultural dispositions associated with social class membership impact peoples cultural tastes.
Reflect upon what low culture might be and whose everyday activities it might characterize.

High Culture & The Extraordinary

Definitions of High Culture
Arnold (1869): Characterized by… great beauty and great intellectual insight. High culture involves a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.
Most Important Works: High culture encompasses the best works that have been produced.
Beneficial Effects: These works constantly challenge us, compelling us to rethink our views and attitudes about the world.
Ultimately our capacities for thinking and reflecting are made superior.

Definitions of High Culture
Scruton (1998): Art can have the same effects as a genuine religious experience: the transcendence of mundane and everyday concerns towards reflections upon the great questions of human life.
According to Scruton, high culture and everyday life are antithetically opposed to each other.
But others asserts that although high culture is separate from and above everyday life, it nonetheless can enrich and augment our everyday existences.

High Culture Today
Today art is either marginalized or trivialized (Adorno 1967).
Works of art are subjugated to the needs of consumer capitalism, where money, image and profit are everything, and quality, thoughtfulness and reflection count for very little.

AKA Mass Culture
Popular Culture

Routinization of Culture
Many assert that pop culture bring us down.
Listening to pop music or reading simplistic books diminishes our faculties (Leavis 1948).
Pop culture is bubblegum for the mind (Macdonald 1953)
Pop culture stunts our imagination and spontaneity (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944).

Routinization of Culture
Adorno and Horkheimer (1944): Pop culture is inferior to high culture because high culture is a singular vision while pop culture is designed by a committee to generate profit by reaching out to the lowest common cultural denominator.
Pop Culture = Mass Culture: mass produced, thoughtless, unsophisticated and hollow.
This is referred to as the industrialization of culture.
Pop culture is based around vast and intricate processes of market research and audience testing.
It has been made for the express purpose of being sold, not of getting us to think or reflect.
Innovation and novelty are scorned because capitalists want to stick with a winning formula so we get an endless parade of standardized, predictable stories and characters.

Routinization of Culture
And thus Culture Industries have been created.
Culture is manufactured, processed, packaged and sold to us in the name of profit.
Our everyday cultural activities (like watching TV, reading newspapers, etc.) are all thoroughly influenced, if not wholly structured, by these Culture Industries.
They churn out endless highly stereotypical products.
We think we have choices, but there is no genuine choice. There can’t be because everything is made to standard designs and templates.
The products created by Culture Industries are inescapable.

Routinization of Culture
Culture Industries
Make us want what they give us.
Advertising : A way of convincing us that we want more of the same all the while making us think it is novel and unprecedented.
The Culture Industries manipulate our desires, making us desire the very things they are going to give us anyway.
Our leisure time is influenced by Culture Industries to get us to spend our time and money in ways that benefit them.
Even leisure is not a matter of free choice – it’s about the illusion of free choice when actually choosing from a limited repertoire.

Inside Mass Culture
Shils (1961): Authors like Adorno have failed to realize that they are making the cultural standards of the social groups in which they were born universal standards.
Different social groups have different understandings of what is good and bad in culture as in everything else.

Inside Mass Culture
A simple opposition between high and pop culture misses that particular works, and even whole genres, can change their cultural standing over time.
What counts as art depends on context (time and place).
Critics: Just because a cultural product is formulaic and stereotypical does not mean that the people who enjoy such a product are unthinking, passive dupes of the Culture Industries.

Inside Mass Culture
Mass Media: Debilitating or Empowering?
Debilitating: Some have said the coming of the mass media disempowered people, making them dependent for entertainment and leisure on products prepared for mass consumption.
Empowering: But we could say that the coming of the new media allowed an expansion of people’s horizons, opening up to a large number of people ideas and things they had never had exposure to before.

Inside Mass Culture
How people respond to what they view – or read or listen to – depends greatly on what their social and cultural background is.
How we each make sense of what we are given by the mass media is made possible by the ideas and values we already possess.
Media gives us the messages, but what we take from that media exposure depends on who we are and who we think we are.
Raymond Williams: What exists is a series of negotiations between media messages and people’s responses to them. What goes on in everyday contexts of viewing and reading cannot simply be deducted from the messages themselves.

Inside Mass Culture
But it would be naïve to think people always think just as they please and are never influenced by media.
We also need to examine the ways in which certain powerful interests can indeed influence everyday contexts of interpreting and understanding.
We should seek to understand how feelings and beliefs can be swayed by the mass media and Culture Industries.
Best View for Now: The mass media sometimes has an identifiable effect on the thinking of certain people within certain social groups. At other times it has little or no discernible effect.

Art & Everyday Activities
Art is part of society and connected to what people do on an everyday basis.
What we take to be great in art could be as much a function of how it is presented and represented to us as it is of any intrinsic qualities the work possesses.
Ex: Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal
Excellent further reading on this topic is “
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark” by Don Thompson.

Art & Everyday Activities
In a modern society, something becomes art if those with the cultural power to define it as such define it that way.
Those with the power of definition have a certain magical capacity: the power to transform the mundane into something regarded as interesting, stimulating, provocative, important (e.g. art).
This is a phenomenon peculiar to modern Western societies in the last 200 years.
The terms art, artwork and artist are historical inventions.
Before then, people produced cultural items for use in specific ways (e.g. worship, glorification, etc.).
These people were regarded as craftsmen, not artists.

Art & Everyday Activities
As religion was beginning to be less influential in Western societies, the idea of art appeared and began to partly take its place.
Art increasingly came to replace God as the storehouse of aesthetic and moral values that were seen to be higher than, and under threat from, vulgar pursuit of money (Horkheimer 1972).
Artists replaced prophets, saints and other religious figures as characters to admire and venerate.
Thus the mid-19th century saw the emergence of a distinct cultural sphere known as the “art world” which was defined as being both separate from and superior to everyday affairs.
However, this understanding can be challenged…

Art & Everyday Activities
The things called “artworks” are each and every day routinely made, sold, distributed, displayed and performed. Just like pop culture, the world of art is made up of networks of productive, distribution and consumption.
Art is very much tied to the everyday and mundane, then!
Artists are embroiled in everyday concerns and mundane

Art & Everyday Activities
Becker’s Definition of Art World (1974): The network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that art world is noted for.
Different sorts of people come together to make the art world work.
Artists rely on a whole series of other people to allow their artistic work to happen.

Art & Everyday Activities
In addition to artists, the art world revolves around a whole series of other people whom carry out specific roles in a complex division of labor.
Distribution and Display Systems & Systems of Appreciation and Criticism play a gate-keeping role in which they help determine what counts as good art.
Some people have more power than others in this regard.
Ex: Curators of Large vs. Small Galleries

Inside the Temples of Art
How art is made is thoroughly bound up with everyday activities. The same is true regarding how art is displayed and performed.
DiMaggio (1986): Understanding the separation between high and low culture involves looking at how such cultures were defined to be different from each other and how that difference was reinforced by keeping those cultures separate from each other, often in very literal ways, such as containing them in separate physical locales.

Inside the Temples of Art
Mannheim (1956): In a society where there are different classes which are hierarchically ordered, then there will be a high culture associated with, made by and consumed by elites and a low culture associated with and consumed by – although not necessarily made by – the lower orders.
The distinction between high and low culture is based on the distinction between classes (refined vs. rude).
Effect: Creation of a sacred realm of art on one side and a profane realm of pop culture on the other.

Inside the Temples of Art
The places dedicated to the worship of high culture – galleries, museums, etc. – are governed by certain norms.
The very category of art remains unquestioned even when particular works are being questioned.
Art is a historical construct, but this rarely comes to the surface.
The beliefs in the validity of art and the notions that art and pop culture and art and everyday life are separate realms continue to be reproduced.
They are indeed separate realms today, but only because our society has organized them that way.

Inside the Temples of Art
Bourdieu: Socialization (Home & School)  Cultural Capital  Appreciation of Art
Challenges the view that great works of art are just naturally so great that their greatness communicates itself to anyone and everyone.
Whether or not a particular cultural product speaks to you or means nothing to you or even repels you is to a large extent dependent on who you are, what background you come from, and how much or how little cultural capital you have.

Low Culture

Low Culture & Resistance
High culture is actually profoundly wrapped up in everyday activities and relationships.
Popular culture also impacts people’s everyday lives.
But what is low culture?

Low Culture & Resistance
Low culture could refer to cultural products which fail to meet certain canons of taste and decorum, and instead exhibit qualities that are the opposite of great art. (Poor Taste)
Since art is so relative, what a particular person what a particular person defines as low culture will vary.
It could also be seen as involving certain creative energies among those at the bottom of the social hierarchy – the working classes, disadvantaged minorities and other groups that might conventionally be seen as the victims of capitalist society. (Low Classes)

Low Culture & Resistance
Low culture might also be defined as resistance.
Low culture is made up of all the sly, cunning, unofficial and yet relatively invisible acts of those whom we might otherwise think were the most oppressed of all.
People can respond to difficult and unpromising circumstances by developing certain means of coping with them and certain ways of avoiding the worst aspects of what is imposed upon them.

Low Culture & Resistance
We could also look at low culture as the ways in which people humanize, decorate, and invest with meanings their common life spaces and social practices (Willis 1990). (Creativity in the Mundane)
Low culture is actually the terrain of grounded aesthetics, ways of thinking, perceiving and evaluating that are just as creative as the activities associated with high culture and the art world.
The way people choose and discuss things – clothes, music, TV – involves symbolic creativity rather than passive acceptance of fads, fashions, and opinions proffered by the Culture Industries.
Grounded aesthetics are the popular and everyday equivalents of high culture, but they go generally unnoticed and unreflected upon.
There is tremendous creative energy in everyday activities and these are forms of cultural innovation are as vital as those in the art world.

Low Culture & Resistance
Lastly, we could see low culture as the values and activities that break the norms of high culture willfully and provocatively.
Popular culture is to be found in the habitual mocking of authority and sly anti-establishment humor of the lower classes and the socially disenfranchised.
Humor can be a weapon of the disenfranchised and oppressed.

Conclusion

Conclusion
Examined the ways high, popular, and low cultures can be described, how they impact everyday life, and how everyday life impacts them.
Some people believe these areas are mutating so fast that they cannot be defined and things cannot be classified. Some think that these distinctions have been abolished in the post-modern world. Some see a blending of high and low elements.
It is true that cultural distinctions are not as clear cut, that classes do not necessarily have their own cultures, and that people on the whole are more culturally omnivorous.
We need to eliminate the dichotomous understanding of high and popular/low culture.
But we must also be careful not to overstate the degree to which they have blended.
As long as there are classes, there will be class cultures.
Little omnivorousness is taking place outside the world of the privileged.
Society is still organized around spheres like the art world and mass media.

image3

The Production, Distribution, and Reception of Culture

Jennifer L. Adams, M.A.

Introduction
The sociological approach to culture maintains that practices or objects that seem natural, even inevitable, are not.
They have a history and a meaning that is embedded in social relations.
Ex: Eskimo Soapstone Carvings (see pgs. 71-72 for details)
Local crafts deemed “authentic” can often find global markets.
Other examples?
Cultural objects are not simply the “natural” products of some social context but are produced, distributed, marketed, received, and interpreted.
This applies to both tangible and intangible cultural objects.

Ex: Mexican Blankets
2

The Production
of Culture

The Production of Culture
We need to understand just how culture – and the cultural objects that are part of it – is produced and learn what impacts the means and processes of production have on cultural objects.
The production-of-culture approach looks at the “complex apparatus which is interposed between cultural creators and consumers (Peterson 1978).
This includes:
Facilities for production and distribution.
Marketing techniques (e.g. advertising, co-opting mass media, targeting).
Creation of situations that bring potential consumers in contact with cultural objects.

The Culture Industry System
Culture Industry System – the orgs that turn out mass culture products like records, books, and low-budget films
These items share features:
Demand is uncertain
Relatively cheap technology
Oversupply of would-be cultural creators
This system works to regulate and package innovation to transform creativity into predictable, marketable packages.
Model was designed with tangible mass culture products in mind, but with minimal modification it can be applied to high culture, ideas, or any other cultural object.
See pages 76-77 for details.

The Culture
Industry System
The creators/artists – who are overly abundant – provide a cultural object.
They must get their creation past Filter #1 and get it in front of the producing organizations.
Producing orgs must get the creation past Filter #2 and reach the gatekeepers of mass media (such as DJs, talk show hosts, reviewers, etc.).
The mass media must then pass the creation through Filter #3 and get it to consumers.
During this process feedback comes from both the mass media and consumers.
Producing orgs use this feedback to assess their success and guide future decisions.

Cultural Markets
Market changes can reverberate throughout a culture industry system.
New markets can diminish artistic distinctiveness (Ex: Peterson’s 1978 study of Elvis’s impact on country music – p. 78) OR lead to cultural differentiation (Ex: Griswold’s 1981 study of 19th century American novels – p. 79).
Bottom Line: no matter how stable a system may be (or at least seem), cultural markets respond to social change.
Ex: Butterfly Fiction (p. 80)

The Production
of Ideas

The Production of Ideas
Tangible (objects) vs. Intangible (ideas)
Both types of cultural objects require creators and recipients and have some relationship to the social world that produces and/or receives them.
Cultural objects compete for public attention, whether it comes in the form of:
Belief (e.g. an ideology or theology)
Institutional Development (e.g. publication, staging, filming, etc.)
Canonization (e.g. awards, institutional approval, etc.)
Sales (e.g. mass culture)
Hits, Views, or Followers (e.g. websites, social media, etc.)
Ex: “All Hits are Flukes” (Bielby 1994) – p. 82

The Production of Ideas
Recall that some times and places are richer in ideological production than others.
Wuthnow (1987): When the old ways of doing things and/or the old understandings of things no longer seem to work, people cast around for new ideas and it is a fertile time for ideological production.
When ideological oversupply takes place, the ideas must compete for resources.
Wuthnow describes this competition for resources as selection.
Ideas gain stability through institutionalization in which the state or some other powerful institution embeds the ideology into its practices.
Ex: Afrocentrism vs. Creationism in Schools (p. 83)

Reception

Reception
Despite core firms in the culture industry system attempting to limit and defend against uncertainty, it remains a reality.
The ultimate success of a cultural objects depends on the cultural recipients (e.g. listeners, viewers, audiences, consumers, etc.) who make their own meanings from it and who will either accept or reject it.
The meaning of cultural objects is certainly suggested by the creators, but the recipients have the last word when it comes to meaning.
So how, and with what degree of freedom, do receivers make cultural objects meaningful?

Reception
Zerubavel’s Social Mind (1997)
Social Mind – between the conception of the mind as just a brain (neuroscience) or just an individual experience (psychoanalysis) lies a perspective of the mind as formed by interpersonal communication
Should be the province of a cognitive sociology that would “highlight our cognitive diversity as members of different thought communities.”
Our social minds – as members of particular groups and categories – shape what we pay attention to, what we get emotional about, and what meanings we draw from environmental signals.
Ex: Oppressed groups being sensitive to any reference to their oppression being perceived as “touchy” or “oversensitive” by outsiders.
There are many ways in which different types of people view the same thing very differently and this is attributable to their social minds. Examples?
Ultimately, the reception of cultural objects and the meaning drawn from them is not embedded in the object itself or subject entirely to individual quirks, but is a result of people’s attributes, positions, and values. In other words, it is social!

Audiences and Taste Cultures
People watch, buy, value, enjoy, use, read, and believe different cultural objects meaning there is a very real cultural stratification.
Some cultural objects cut across social boundaries, but many do not.
Ex: Detective Novels and Popular Mainstream TV Shows
Middle class people have more breadth of knowledge than those in lower classes and are referred to as cultural omnivores.
This allows them to operate in a variety of social settings because they switch their presentation of cultural knowledge to suit the occasion.
In other words, they have what Bordieu (1984) would call cultural capital.
CC can be accumulated and invested.
CC can be converted into economic capital.
See pages 85-86 for details.

Audiences and Taste Cultures
Because people understand that cultural capital matters, groups naturally tend to inflate the value of what they already possess and try to prevent other groups from getting it.
Levine (1988) documented how upper-class white Americans, feeling threated by new immigrant groups, segregated their cultural institutions and deemed them “high culture.”
This high culture is supported and honored by everyone but not readily available to the masses.
Ex: Early museums not being open on nights and weekends.
They also sometimes problematize or get in the way of popular culture.
Ex: Using laws to make popular culture (like burlesque) illegal.

Audiences and Taste Cultures
In sum, it is clear that:
1. The reception of various types of cultural objects is often stratified by social class (and other factors).
2. People may consciously or unconsciously use culture to support their social advantages or overcome their disadvantages.
3. The variety or breadth of someone’s cultural repertoire is more socially useful than depth in some specific area.

Horizons of Expectations
Jauss (1982) Studied Readers
He pointed out that when a reader comes to a book, she does not come to it as an empty vessel waiting for its contents to be filled but locates it against a “horizon of expectations” shaped by her previous literary, cultural, and social experience.
A reader interprets and finds meaning in the text on the basis of how it fits or challenges her expectations, and this interpretation then impacts her horizon of expectations moving forward.
This notion is useful well beyond literature, offering us a way to understand how any cultural object may be interpreted by people with specific types of social and cultural knowledge and experience.
And looking at the different interpretations of the same object by different groups may reveal deeply held social assumptions.
Ex: Dallas Interpretations (p. 88)
And it suggests how any event may be transformed into a cultural object by being made meaningful.
Ex: Death of a Child (pgs. 87-88)

Horizons of Expectations
Our understanding of how producers of cultural objects attempt to engage a receiving group’s horizon of expectations utilizes the framing model.
If cultural creators can frame their product or message so it resonates with a frame that the audience already possesses, they are more likely to persuade the audience to “buy” or accept (an idea, a product, or a taste).
Ex: Propaganda (p. 88)
But sometimes creators have no idea how an object will be received.
Ex: Tech Innovation (pages 88-89)
This leaves us with questions.
If every group has its own distinctive horizon of expectations, can such groups of people construct any meanings they please?
Can cultural objects be interpreted in any way whatsoever or to the form and content of cultural objects constrain the meanings?

Freedom of Interpretation
Two Views

Freedom of Interpretation
When we encounter a cultural object, we react, construct interpretations, and make meanings.
But how much freedom do we have in making these meanings? Is it constrained?
Two Possible Answers:
1. People must submit to whatever meanings are inherently contained in the cultural object.
receivers weak, cultural objects strong [mass culture theory]
2. People can make any meanings whatsoever.
receivers strong, cultural objects weak [popular culture theory]
Both extremes have weaknesses. (See pages 89-90 for details.)
1: The “proper meaning superstition” which implies that people ignorant to the conventions of a particular cultural object may not understand it.
2: Denies cultures role as a collective representation and undermines culture’s capacity to serve as a means whereby people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitude toward life.

Seduction by Mass Culture
Mass Culture Theory
Culture industry is problematized and seen as producing mass entertainment aiming at a low common denominator of taste and emphasizing the lurid over the moral or intellectual.
The products they produce render their recipients numb and apathetic which leaves them passive and ripe for political tyranny and demanding ever-more-sensational materials as they become more and more jaded.
All audiences are innocent so all of them can be seduced by the mass cultural objects produced by the culture industry.

Resistance Through
Popular Culture
Popular Culture Theory
Popular culture means the culture of the common people, the non-elite majority.
Includes mass cultural products like TV shows, popular magazines, and off-the-rack fashion.
It emphasizes the wisdom, common sense, values, and way of life of “the people,” especially the nonpowerful and nonwealthy (who lack both economic and cultural capital).
It is the system of meanings available to ordinary people.
The sociological approach to PC began to change in the 1960s as marginalized groups (like women and POC) began to demand respect.
We began to see the complexities and beauties of popular culture as well as the hegemony, patriarchy, and racism inherent in some high culture.
Ex: Changing view of black English
Ex: Structure of the leadership of Catholocism

Resistance Through
Popular Culture
This reevaluation of popular culture unfolded in two ways.
1. Looking for hidden meanings in popular culture that had been accessible to its recipients but missed by academics and disdainful elites.
Ex: romance novels (p. 93)
2. Understanding how recipients construct subversive meanings within popular culture.
Analogy: Mass Culture as Supermarket
People pick up mass-produced items from the cultural supermarket, but when they cook (make meanings), they mix these supermarket goods with whatever they have in the pantry at home, thereby individualizing and transforming the final product – sometimes with surprising results.
Ex: Reactions to The Newlywed Game (pgs. 93-94)

Summary
Having already examined cultural objects and social meanings and the collective creation of these objects, we turned to the production of culture.
Including linkages between creators, objects, and recipients.
Recipients bear socially shaped horizons of expectations and are engaged – either actively or passively – with the culture they experience and interpret.
Passively: Numbed out acceptance of the intended meaning.
Actively: Grassroots power to reinterpret and make meaning.
Next, we will apply what we have learned to social problems and the real world.

Any questions?

image4

image3

image5

image6

image2