Unibrow
A couple of weeks ago I wrote some posts defending wikipaedia. A thing
that probably doesn't need defending as much as it needs pay pals. I
didn't like the idea that information gatekeepers might be going on
disparaging it, working themselves up to bald statements that it was
just not real information at all. The general line I took was that
handbooks, factbooks, almanacs, and annual reports, and the libraries
and archives that collect them are all well and good. They tend to
collect information from the integer disciplines very well:
engineering, chemistry, etc. From the realm of culture society,
politics, art; they catch varying sublties of established culture,
respected and endowed. And sports - when bats hit balls, this is noted.
In the course of that I tried to come up with a decent
working definition of highbrow and lowbrow culture. On this wheel of
culture I suspected a lot of this collection management turned. Except
for occasional facets of ordinary manufacture somehow deemed worthy of
academic examination and classification, the common world lies low
unexplored and undescribed, in the hands of its immediate audience
only. The Web log Psuedopodium has turned out just such a defination.
[A]n institutional distinction. The lowbrow is subject to
cultural and economic pressure en masse; the highbrow is sustained
largely by individuals' nostalgia for roles which are (now) free of
such pressure.No one talks about a painting or a poem outside the brand
of its creator, whereas comics and science fiction packaging may barely
register the authors' names. ...It's all business, of course, but the
rhetoric of the businesses differ.
On the Internet, No One Knows You're an Ex-Abstract-Expressionist
High art being glamorized pre-industrial ,
hand crafted of a personal touch has some appeal
(and explanatory power). Turning to low art, lowbrow culture
openly depend[ing] on mass reproduction , and as
ephemeral as poster paper, where is the unique object, what is the
center, the source, of fascination in the phenomonen, what is being
contemplated
responded to? Where does one need to stand, and with what detachment in
order to see it? There is enough residual Fugazi in me to take some
comfort in the knowledge that largely no one who is not responding
knows or
cares.
[even as I write this, i admit I have not followed all the links in psuedpd.'s piece ]
11:41:04 PM  ;;
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