There's High Culture, There’s Low Culture and there’s Pop Culture

I used to think that I was a high culture kind of guy. I’d talk about dead artists with my girlfriend/mom/dad/local transients for the longest time. It didn’t matter; I wanted to talk about it. I don’t know why I would do this, but my bet is that it was probably an attempt to seem smart and marginalize the experiences of other people. Probably, I thought I had better taste or could learn more about art from a single painting, or a single album than anyone else could learn from all of the art in the world. In short, it’s probably because I was a teenager.

At the time, I think I liked art because I thought it could explain the emotions and feelings of an artist in his era. In conjunction, I thought they probably captured the zeitgeist in which they lived.

Today, I don’t care about high culture art. It honestly makes no difference to me. Now don’t take this the wrong way, Vincent Van Gogh painted some really cool stuff and I like to gaze at it, but there is no way that I think Starry, Starry Night reflects the feelings of an entire culture. I look back on my past self and wonder how I ever could have thought that a guy who was crazy enough to cut his own ear off ever could have had that same lobe to the ground understanding the pulse and needs of the general public.

I like low culture art, and it is not because I like ideas contained in pop art like the acceleration of culture (which probably exists to some extent) or moral relativism (which is on display throughout this journey). I like low culture art because it tells me what I should be or at the very least, what other people think I should be. I think I probably like it because of marketing executives.

Marketing executives have one job; to advertise through creating art in the hopes that it will induce me to consume said product. Therefore, they are creating art they think I will like (and buy) in hopes I’ll spend my hard-earned bones on their wares. Low culture art tells me about what I should be through the eyes of others. I think this form of art reflects our era better than a thousand contemporary pieces of high culture art.

I’ve seen every Saved by the Bell episode at least two or three times, and I’m proud to admit it. Saved by The Bell characterizes what people thought a normal high school experience in the early ‘90’s should be (maybe) minus the comic relief of Mr. Belding. Now, in the early ‘90’s I was in fourth grade and as such I thought every thing Zack Morris did was not only ubercool but entirely plausible. I saw no reason why the coolest kid in school wouldn’t be able to call timeout and have an internal monologue with an exterior audience. I also thought it was totally normal that Zack would only have five friends even though that’s sort of an antithesis of being cool (I guess I thought that the most important facet of coolness was exclusivity or something). It didn’t even register to me that Zack’s friends were all high school stereotypes. None of this mattered. What mattered is that as early as fourth grade I knew what was expected of me in high school because Saved by the Bell explained it to me.

This cultural significance is what makes Saved by the Bell more important than any high culture art form. It is cultural art. This is what we expect life to be. If you were to put pop art in a time capsule it wouldn’t be a very good reflection of the beauty that humans can create outside of societal norms, it would be a reflection of the experience of living within societal norms. Pop art teaches us how we actually expect ourselves to live. It is a reflection of us. I think this is somehow more beautiful.