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The discussion about high culture and popular culture in our society has been going on for decades. In few places is it as loud as within culture journalism and the critics’ society, where the question of what is good taste and what is dumb entertainment constantly gets brought to the surface. Film is a particularly vulnerable area, since it is such a universally appealing and rather young medium. In America and England several studies have been performed of the reviewing society and reveiwers’ use of high and low art-discourse in their writing. The Swedish market is sorely lacking in this area.   This study is an attempt to shed some light on the way Swedish culture journalism works, with the focus being Swedish film reviews. The goal is to explore the use of high culture and popular culture discourse within Swedish reviews by examining the movie reviews published in the two large Swedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet in 2013. The reviews were studied using a number of variables, some of which represented the high culture discourse, and some of which represented the popular culture discourse. The study showed that the reviewers of these newspapers tended to use both high art discourse and popular culture discourse within their reviews to almost the same extent. The news papers were also very similar in the way they used the variables for high culture and popular culture discourse.

The paper focuses on the collision of high and popular culture in Robert Coover’s collection of short stories “Pricksongs and Descants”. The methods chosen for the study are close reading and textual analysis by interpreting every short story, defining its genre, noticing the features of high and popular culture and ways of presenting them, grasping the hot point where high and popular cultures collide, analyzing the aim and message of the collision. The paper emphasizes the blend of high-popular culture collision and discloses it with the help of postmodernism, high and popular culture instances, intertextuality, metafiction and genres transformation techniques through the themes of sexuality, violence and television. The research has revealed the message of the author hidden in the collision of high and low culture to satirize the image of 1960s America society and help the readers better understand the present reality. / Šio darbo tikslas yra atskleisti aukštosios ir populiariosios kultūrų sankirtą amerikiečių rašytojo Roberto Coover’io apsakymų rinkinyje ,,Raudos ir dainos” (1969) remiantis postmodernizmo literatūros ypatumais: naujų formų ieškojimu, ,,žaidimu” su jomis, populiariosios kultūros pabrėžimu, aukštosios ir žemosios kultūrų suliejimu, ironija, juoduoju jumoru, absurdo fantazija. Aptariami pagrindiniai postmodernistinės visuomenės bruožai – žmonių susvetimėjimas, įsiliejimas į masės visuomenę, vertybių praradimas, grožio kultas ir seksualumo garbinimas, dieviškųjų absoliutų atmetimas, smurto ir nepagarbaus elgesio protrūkiai, keiksmažodžiais užteršta žmonių kalba. Šie bruožai analizuojami apsakymų rinkinyje “Raudos ir dainos”, nes jų pagalba ir yra atskleidžiama anksčiau minėtųjų kultūrų sankirta. Prie šios sankirtos atskleidimo prisideda ir intertekstualumo, metafikcijos ir žanrų (pasakų, religinių istorijų, įprastų, gerai žinomų kasdienių įvykių) transformavimo pavyzdžiai. Pagrindiniai darbo metodai yra nuodugnus skaitymas, kiekvieno apsakymo analizavimas ir interpretavimas, bandant apibrėžti jo žanrą, pastebint aukštosios ir populiariosios kultūrų atvejus ir jų pateikimo būdus, užčiuopiant šių dviejų kultūrų susikirtimo tašką ir analizuojant toje sankirtoje paslėptą autoriaus mintį. Darbe atskleidžiama pagrindinė apsakymų rinkinio mintis – nepasitenkinimas šiuolaikine Amerikos visuomene. Remiantis apsakymų rinkinio analize, bandoma parodyti, jog visuomenė yra nykimo... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

As one of many other distinct painting styles that appeared on ceramics throughout the Guatemalan Lowlands of the Late Classic Period (AD 600-900), the Red Background vases represented the economic reach of the owner into local and foreign courtly culture. Supernatural processions, playful hieroglyphic texts, and the distinctive red background circulated on vases, plates, and bowls in order to perform prestige and the elite identity in public feasts. The diverse narrative content of these vessels reveals the importance of mytho-historic origin stories and supernatural identities to the prevailing political order, while the unique hieroglyphic texts link the style and its imagery to the royal court of Pa’ Chan. However, the lack of context for most of these vases thwarts a straightforward understanding of their role in Maya society as objects from a specific geographic place with archaeological provenience. Despite this inability to embed the Red Background vases within a robust archaeological framework, the production and circulation of a visually distinct style by a named community still indicates that the creators of these objects wished to communicate a unique artistic identity through an intersection of formal qualities. Refocusing the question of agency through the lens of the final product reveals that these works acted as part of a larger campaign to create the typical courtly trappings of master artisan production and public social feasting with representatives of other powerful polities. This Master’s Thesis aims to examine the current corpus of almost sixty vases in order to describe how the Red Background style manifests. In addition, my study explores the tendency of many polychrome styles to link a specific royal court with the artistic product through hieroglyphic emblems. I conclude that the unique Pa’ Chan emblem takes this extroverted statement of belonging to a higher level, providing an emic classification of the vase where the text comprises a social category of art that performs identity through its distinct visuals. / text

This thesis defines wide phenomenon of popular culture and follows the way it is represented in current Czech press. The initial part of the thesis defines popular culture based on the main theoretical grounds. After that popular culture is put in context of the mass society media audiences and emphasize the delimitation of pop culture versus high culture. The theoretical part of the thesis is closed by chapter concerning the role of the press in the process of defining the popular culture in current society. The main focus of the empirical part lies on frame analysis across the spectrum of Czech dailies (Blesk, Lidové noviny, Mladá fronta Dnes) and weeklies (Instinkt, Kulturní týdeník A2, Reflex) that examines how the popular culture is presented to the current readership. The analysed articles were published at the time of broadcasting of the first series of the examined pop cultural event represented by a TV show "StarDance…Když hvězdy tančí". The discovered framework is interpreted in context of the theoretical concepts and subsequently it is confronted with a point of view of the current journalists (by means of semi-structured interviews), who write about popular culture on everyday basis and who in a sense represent a cultural elite themselves. The main goal is to find out (in connection...

The divide between popular culture and high culture has been a subject of discussion since the early days of media research. Even though popular culture has a somewhat higher status today than in the early 1900’s, the division between the two cultural forms still exists. For example, the movies that appeal to the great masses are rarely awarded the most prestigious European film prices. The aim of this study was to examine how these two cultural practices is separated in film reviews on the Swedish film site MovieZine with the use of the socio-cultural theories of Adorno, Horkheimer and Bourdieu. The main issues consisted of what types of rhetorical arguments the critics use to value the film, and what types of cultural references they make in the different reviews The selection of the movie reviews for this study was based on the ten most viewed movies in Swedish cinema in 2016, and ten movies that were awarded some of the most prestigious and refined American and European film prices in the same year. The general result showed that the film critics used different types of rhetorical arguments based on what type of films they reviewed. In their reviews of the more high cultural films, the citric based their arguments on matters that are considered to be of a more intellectual and analytical kind, than in the reviews of the films that appeal to the masses. The critics often referred to movies or other cultural phenomenon that could be placed on the same side of the cultural spectrum as the movies they reviewed.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att studera relevansen av Pierre Bourdieus teorier idag genom att undersöka om bakgrunden hos individer påverkar vem som arbetar på ett fint – gentemot ett populärkulturellt museum och om denna distinktion uttrycker sig i museernas organisationsidentiteter. För att samla in empiriskt material genomfördes fyra semistrukturerade intervjuer med personer på ledande positioner från Nationalmuseum och ABBA the museum. Även analys av arbetsannonser utfördes för att nå vilka egenskaper som eftersöks på vardera museum. Utfallet av studien visar att det finns tendenser av det finkulturella på Nationalmuseum och av det populärkulturella på ABBA the museum som vi kan knyta till de intervjuade personernas bakgrund. I ett fall av de fyra intervjuade stämde inte Bourdieus teorier helt, vilket gör att teorierna i det anseendet kan ifrågasättas. Distinktionen återfanns även i arbetsannonserna. Dessa tendenser mot det fin- och populärkulturella lyser delvis igenom i organisationsidentiteten. / The purpose of this study was to investigate the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to capture their relevance today. Does the background of an individual affect whether they choose to work at a high culture museum or a museum of popular culture? Furthermore, if this expresses itself in the organizationalidentity. To collect empirical data four semi-structured interviews were performed with persons in managerial roles at the Swedish Nationalmuseum and ABBA the museum. An analysis of employment advertisements was also carried out to reach which attributes were required at the two museums. The study show that Nationalmuseum have tendencies categorising them as high culture whilst ABBA the museum is of the popular kind. Both findings can be related to the backgrounds of the interviewed managers. However, one of the four cases did not match with the theories of Bourdieu, making the theories in that regard questionable. The distinction was also found in the employment advertisements. These tendencies towards the high – and popular culture partially shines through in the organizationalidentity.

Die Arbeit präsentiert die Geschichte der modernen Wirtschaftswerbung in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts und zeigt, dass Werbung trotz kultureller Barrieren die Alltagswelten der Deutschen kolonialisierte und Einfluss auf die „deutsche Kultur“ nahm. Die Arbeit zeigt, dass das Konstrukt der „deutschen Kultur“ nicht ausschließlich durch die bürgerliche Hochkultur definiert wurde, sondern zunehmend auch durch Einflüsse der Konsumkultur bestimmt war. Die Bilderwelten der Werbung prägten nationale Ikonen, schufen (bspw. durch Leuchtwerbung) modifizierte "Oberflächen" und Raumwahrnehmungen, ebenso wie die Logik der Marktdifferenzierung und des Marketing soziale Interaktionen als auch die politische Kommunikation (Hitler als Marke) zu bestimmen begann. Diese Entwicklung verlief nicht konfliktfrei. Sowohl die Debatten über Werbung als auch die direkte Konfrontation zwischen Kulturkritikern und Werbern verdeutlichen den massiven Zusammenprall zweier Mentalitäten, die den Konflikt von traditionellem zünftigem Denken, hochkultureller Repräsentation sowie einer vermeintlich authentischen Ästhetik des Inhalts auf der einen Seite und einer "Welt des Scheins" und einer Ästhetik der äußeren Form auf der anderen Seite hervortreten ließ. In dieser Debatte spielte eine Frage eine zentrale Rolle: inwieweit Kapitalismus, Marktwirtschaft, Konsum und die Ästhetik der modernen Lebenswelt mit ihrer spezifischen (werblichen) Oberflächenstruktur mit Vorstellungen "des Deutschen" zu vereinbaren waren. / This dissertation offers a history of modern commercial advertising during the first half of the twentieth century and demonstrates that despite cultural barriers, advertising colonized the everyday world of Germans and began to encroach upon “German culture”. The work shows that the construct of “German culture” was not only defined by bourgeois high culture, but rather increasingly by factors from consumer culture. The imagery of advertising shaped national icons, created modified “surfaces” (for example, through illuminated ad media) and perceptions of space. Likewise, the logic of market differentiation and marketing began to determine social interactions as well as political communication (Hitler branding). This development did not progress without conflict: Debates surrounding both advertising as well as the direct confrontation between cultural critics and advertisers make clear that there was a massive collision between two mentalities. This allowed a conflict to emerge between traditional, guild thinking, high cultural representations and a putatively authentic aesthetics of content, on the one hand, and on the other hand, a “world of appearances” and aesthetic of the exterior form. One question in particular played a central role in this debate, namely: the extent to which capitalism, the market economy, consumption and the aesthetics of the modern Lebenswelt with its specific (commercial) texture were in accord with ideas of “Germanness.”