Elite or high culture for many years remains inaccessible to the understanding of most people. This explains its name. It is created and consumed by a narrow circle of people. Most people are not even aware of the existence of this form of culture, are unfamiliar with its definition.
Elite, folk and mass - is there a similarity
Folk art is the founder of any other cultural trend in general. Her works are created by nameless creators, they come from the people. Such creations convey features of each time, image and style of life of people. This type of art includes fairy tales, epics, myths.
Mass culture developed on the basis of folk culture. It has a large audience and is aimed at creating such works that will be understandable and accessible to everyone. It has less value than any other. The results of its activities are produced in large volumes, they do not take into account the refined tastes or the spiritual depth of people.
Elite culture is created by professionals for a specific circle of people with a certain level of education and knowledge. It does not seek to win the sympathy of the masses. With the help of such works, the masters are looking for answers to eternal questions, trying to convey the depth of the human soul.
Over time, works of high creativity can be appreciated by the masses. Nevertheless, leaving for the people, such creativity remains the highest step in the development of any kind of art.
Features and signs of elite culture
In the best way, the differences and signs of elite works of art can be seen in their comparison with the mass ones.
All signs of elite art are opposed to mass or folk art, which are created for a wide range of viewers. Therefore, its results often remain misunderstood and unappreciated by most people. Awareness of their greatness and significance occurs only after more than one decade, and sometimes even a century.
What works belong to the elite culture
Many examples of elite works are now known to everyone.
The group of people for whom such masterpieces of art are created may not be distinguished by an old name, nobility of the family and other differences that characterize the elite in everyday speech. It is possible to understand and appreciate such creations only with the help of a certain level of development, a set of knowledge and skills, a pure and clear consciousness.
Primitive mass creativity will not be able to help in the development of the level of intelligence and education.
It does not affect the depths of the human soul, it does not seek to know the essence of being. It adapts to the requirements of the time and desires of the consumer. That is why the development of an elite culture is very important for all mankind. It is such works that help even a small circle of people to maintain a high level of education and the ability to appreciate truly beautiful works of art and their authors.
from French elite - selective, chosen, the best high culture, the consumers of which are educated people, is distinguished by a very high degree of specialization, designed, so to speak, for "internal use" and often tends to complicate its language, that is, to make it inaccessible to most people. ? The subculture of privileged groups about-va, characterized by a fundamental closeness, spiritual aristocracy and value-semantic self-sufficiency. Appealing to a select minority of his subjects, who, as a rule, are both its creators and addressees (in any case, the circle of both almost coincides), E.K. consciously and consistently opposes the culture of the majority, or mass culture in a broad sense (in all its historical and typological varieties - folklore, folk culture, official culture of a particular estate or class, the state as a whole, the cultural industry of technocratic. about -va of the 20th century, etc.) (see Mass culture). Moreover, E.k. needs a permanent context of mass culture, since it is based on the mechanism of repulsion from the values and norms accepted in mass culture, on the destruction of the prevailing stereotypes and patterns of mass culture (including their parody, ridicule, irony, grotesque, controversy, criticism, refutation), on demonstrative self-isolation in general, national culture. In this regard, E.k. - a characteristically marginal phenomenon within the framework of any history. or national type of culture and always - secondary, derivative in relation to the culture of the majority. The problem of E.K. is especially acute. in societies where the antinomy of mass culture and e.k. practically exhausts the whole variety of manifestations of nat. culture as a whole and where the medial (“median”) area of the nationwide did not develop. culture, which is its core. corpus and equally opposed to the polarized mass and e. cultures as value-semantic extremes. This is typical, in particular, for cultures that have a binary structure and are prone to inversion forms of history. development (Russian and typologically similar cultures). Policies differ. and cultural elites; the first, also called “ruling”, “powerful”, today, thanks to the works of V. Pareto, G. Mosca, R. Michels, C.R. Mills, R. Miliband, J. Scott, J. Perry, D. Bell and other sociologists and political scientists have been studied in sufficient detail and in depth. Cultural elites are much less studied - strata united not by economic, social, political. and actually power interests and goals, but ideological principles, spiritual values, socio-cultural norms, etc. Connected in principle by similar (isomorphic) mechanisms of selection, status consumption, prestige, elite watered. and cultural ones, however, do not coincide with each other and only occasionally enter into temporary alliances that turn out to be extremely unstable and fragile. Suffice it to recall the spiritual dramas of Socrates, condemned to death by his fellow citizens, and Plato, who became disillusioned with the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius (the Elder), who undertook to put into practice the Platonic utopia of the “State”, Pushkin, who refused to “serve the tsar, serve the people” and thereby who recognized the inevitability of his creativity. loneliness, although regal in its own way (“You are a king: live alone”), and L. Tolstoy, who, contrary to his origin and position, strove to express the “folk idea” by means of his high and unique art of the word, European. education, sophisticated author's philosophy and religion. It is worth mentioning here the short flowering of sciences and arts at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent; the experience of the highest patronage of Louis XIV to the Muses, which gave the world examples of Western European. classicism; a brief period of cooperation between the enlightened nobility and the noble bureaucracy during the reign of Catherine II; short-lived union pre-revolutionary. Russian intelligentsia with Bolshevik power in the 20s. and so on. in order to assert the multidirectional and largely mutually exclusive nature of the interacting political and cultural elites, to-rye close the social-semantic and cultural-semantic structures of the society, respectively, and coexist in time and space. This means that E.k. is not the offspring and product of polit. elites (as often stated in Marxist studies) and is not of a class-party nature, and in many cases develops in the fight against polit. elites for their independence and freedom. On the contrary, it is logical to assume that it is the cultural elites that contribute to the formation of polit. elites (structurally isomorphic to cultural elites) in a narrower sphere of socio-political, state. and power relations as its own special case, isolated and alienated from the whole E.k. Unlike polit. elites, spiritual, creative elites develop their own, fundamentally new mechanisms of self-regulation and value-semantic criteria for activity-based election, which go beyond the scope of social and political ones. requirements, and often accompanied by a demonstrative departure from politics and social institutions and a semantic opposition to these phenomena as extra-cultural (unesthetic, immoral). , unspiritual, intellectually poor and vulgar). In E.K. the range of values recognized as true and “high” is deliberately limited, and the system of norms accepted by this stratum as mandatory is tightened. and rigorous in the community of “initiates”. Quantity. narrowing of the elite and its spiritual cohesion is inevitably accompanied by its qualities. growth (in intellectual, aesthetic, religious, ethical and other respects), and hence the individualization of norms, values, evaluative criteria for activity, often the principles and forms of behavior of members of the elite community, thereby becoming unique. Actually, for the sake of this, the circle of norms and values of E.K. becomes emphatically high, innovative, which can be achieved in different ways. means: 1) the development of new social and mental realities as cultural phenomena or, on the contrary, the rejection of any new and the “protection” of a narrow circle of conservative values and norms; 2) the inclusion of one's subject in an unexpected value-semantic context, which makes its interpretation unique and even excludes. meaning; 3) the creation of a new, deliberately complicated cultural semantics (metaphorical, associative, allusive, symbolic and metasymbolic), requiring special preparation and vast cultural horizons; 4) the development of a special cultural language (code), accessible only to a narrow circle of connoisseurs and designed to impede communication, erect insurmountable (or most difficult to overcome) semantic barriers to profane thinking, which turns out to be in principle unable to adequately comprehend the innovations of E.C., “decipher” it meanings; 5) the use of a deliberately subjective, individually creative, “defamiliarizing” interpretation of the ordinary and familiar, which brings the subject’s cultural assimilation of reality closer to a mental (sometimes artistic) experiment on it and, to the extreme, replaces the reflection of reality in E.C. its transformation, imitation - deformation, penetration into the meaning - conjecture and rethinking of the given. Due to its semantic and functional “closeness”, “narrowness”, isolation from the whole nat. culture, E.K. often turns into a variety (or similarity) of the secret, sacred, esoteric. knowledge that is taboo for the rest of the masses, and its bearers turn into a kind of “priests” of this knowledge, the chosen ones of the gods, “servants of the muses”, “keepers of secrets and faith”, which is often played up and poeticized in E.k. Historical origin of E.K. exactly this: already in primitive society, priests, sorcerers, sorcerers, tribal leaders become privileged holders of special knowledge, which cannot and should not be intended for general, mass use. Subsequently, this kind of relationship between E.k. and mass culture in one form or another, in particular secular, have been repeatedly reproduced (in various religious denominations and especially sects, in monastic and spiritual-knightly orders, Masonic lodges, in craft workshops that cultivated professional skills, in religious and philosophical gatherings, in literary, artistic and intellectual circles that are formed around a charismatic leader, in scientific communities and scientific schools, in political associations and parties - including especially those that worked secretly, conspiratorially, in conditions of underground and etc.). Ultimately, the elitism of knowledge, skills, values, norms, principles, and traditions that was formed in this way was the key to refined professionalism and deep subject specialization, without which history is impossible in culture. progress, act. value-semantic growth, contain. enrichment and accumulation of formal perfection - any value-semantic hierarchy. e.c. acts as an initiative and productive beginning in any culture, performing mainly creative work. function in it; while mass culture stereotypes, routinizes, profanes the achievements of E.K., adapting them to the perception and consumption of the socio-cultural majority of the society. In turn, E.k. constantly ridicules or denounces mass culture, parodies it or deforms it grotesquely, presenting the world of mass society and its culture as terrible and ugly, aggressive and cruel; in this context, the fate of the representatives of E.k. are drawn tragic, hurt, broken (romantic and post-romantic concepts of “genius and the crowd”; “creative madness”, or “sacred disease”, and ordinary “common sense”; inspired “intoxication”, including narcotic , and vulgar “sobriety”; “celebration of life” and boring everyday life). Theory and practice of E.K. flourishes especially productively and fruitfully at the "breakdown" of cultural epochs, with the change of cultural-historical. paradigms, expressing in a peculiar way the crisis states of culture, the unstable balance between the “old” and the “new”, the representatives of the E.C. realized their mission in culture as “pioneers of the new”, as being ahead of their time, as creators not understood by their contemporaries (such, for example, are the majority of romantics and modernists - symbolists, cultural figures of the avant-garde and professional revolutionaries who carried out the cultural revolution) . This also includes the “initiators” of large-scale traditions and the creators of the “grand style” paradigms (Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Kafka, etc.). ). This point of view, though fair in many respects, was not, however, the only possible one. So, on the basis of Russian. culture (where the public attitude to E.C. was in most cases wary or even hostile, which did not even contribute to the relative spread of E.C., in comparison with Western Europe), concepts were born that interpret E.C. as a conservative departure from social reality and its topical problems into the world of idealized aesthetics (“pure art”, or “art for art’s sake”), relig. and mythol. fantasies, socio-political. utopia, philosophy. idealism, etc. (late Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, M. Antonovich, N. Mikhailovsky, V. Stasov, P. Tkachev and other radical democratic thinkers). In the same tradition, Pisarev and Plekhanov, as well as Ap. Grigoriev interpreted E.k. (including "art for art's sake") as a demonstrative form of rejection of social and political. reality, as an expression of a hidden, passive protest against it, as a refusal to participate in societies. struggle of his time, seeing in this a characteristic history. a symptom (a deepening crisis), and the expressed inferiority of the E. to. (lack of breadth and historical foresight, social weakness and impotence to influence the course of history and the life of the masses). Theorists of E.C. - Plato and Augustine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Vl. Solovyov and Leontiev, Berdyaev and A. Bely, Ortega y Gasset and Benjamin, Husserl and Heidegger, Mannheim and Ellul - variously varied the thesis about the hostility of democratization and the massification of culture of its qualities. level, its content and formal perfection, creative. search and intellectual, aesthetic, religious. and other novelty, about stereotyped and triviality inevitably accompanying mass culture (ideas, images, theories, plots), lack of spirituality, about the infringement of creativity. personality and the suppression of her freedom in the conditions of mass about-va and mechanical. replication of spiritual values, expansion of industrial production of culture. This trend is a deepening of the contradictions between E.K. and mass - unprecedentedly intensified in the 20th century. and inspired a lot of sharp and dramatic. collisions (cf., for example, the novels: “Ulysses” by Joyce, “In Search of Lost Time” by Proust, “The Steppenwolf” and “The Glass Bead Game” by Hesse, “Magic Mountain” and “Doctor Faustus” by T. Mann, “We ” Zamyatin, “Life of Klim Samgin” by Gorky, “Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, “Pit” and “Chevengur” by Platonov, “Pyramid” by L. Leonov, etc.). At the same time in the history of culture of the 20th century. there are many examples that clearly illustrate the paradoxical dialectics of E.K. and mass: their mutual transition and mutual transformation, mutual influence and self-negation of each of them. For example, creative searching for various representatives of modern culture (symbolists and impressionists, expressionists and futurists, surrealists and dadaists, etc.) - both artists and theorists of trends, and philosophers, and publicists - were sent to create unique samples and entire systems of e.k. Many of the formal refinements were experimental in nature; theor. manifestos and declarations substantiated the right of the artist and thinker to be creative. incomprehensibility, separation from the masses, their tastes and needs, to the inherently valuable being of “culture for culture’s sake”. However, as everyday objects, everyday situations, forms of everyday thinking, structures of generally accepted behavior, current history fell into the expanding field of activity of modernists. events, etc. (albeit with a “minus” sign, as a “minus device”), modernism began - involuntarily, and then consciously - to appeal to the masses and mass consciousness. Outrageous and scoffing, grotesque and denunciation of the layman, buffoonery and farce - these are the same legitimate genres, stylistic devices and will express. means of mass culture, as well as playing up clichés and stereotypes of mass consciousness, poster and agitation, farce and ditty, recitation and rhetoric. The stylization or parody of banality is almost indistinguishable from the stylized and paraded (with the exception of the ironic author's distance and the general semantic context, which remain almost imperceptible to mass perception); on the other hand, the recognizability and familiarity of vulgarity makes its criticism - highly intellectual, subtle, aestheticized - little understandable and effective for the bulk of the recipients (who are not able to distinguish mockery of base taste from indulgence to it). As a result, the same work of culture acquires a double life with decomp. semantic content and opposite ideological pathos: on one side it turns out to be turned to e.k., on the other - to mass culture. Such are the many works of Chekhov and Gorky, Mahler and Stravinsky, Modigliani and Picasso, L. Andreev and Verharn, Mayakovsky and Eluard, Meyerhold and Shostakovich, Yesenin and Kharms, Brecht and Fellini, Brodsky and Voinovich. Contamination of E. to. is especially inconsistent. and mass culture in postmodern culture; for example, in such an early phenomenon of Postmodernism as Pop Art, there is an elitization of mass culture and, at the same time, a massification of elitism, which gave rise to the classics of modern. postmodernist U. Eco to characterize pop art as “low-browed high-browedness”, or, conversely, as “high-browed low-browedness” (in English. : Lowbrow Highbrow, or Highbrow Lowbrow). There are no less paradoxes when comprehending the genesis of a totalitarian culture (see Totalitarian culture), which, by definition, is a mass culture and mass culture. However, according to its origin, totalitarian culture is rooted precisely in E.C. thinkers who anticipated and brought Germans closer to real power. Nazism, belonged unconditionally to E.K. and were in a number of cases misunderstood and distorted by their practical. interpreters, primitivized, simplified to a rigid scheme and uncomplicated demagogy. The same is true with the communist totalitarianism: the founders of Marxism - Marx and Engels, and Plekhanov, and Lenin himself, and Trotsky, and Bukharin - all of them were, in their own way, "highbrow" intellectuals and represented a very narrow circle of radical intelligentsia. Moreover, the ideal the atmosphere of social-democratic, socialist, Marxist circles, then strictly secret party cells, was built in full accordance with the principles of E.K. (only extended to political and cognitive culture), and the principle of party membership implied not just selectivity, but also a rather strict selection of values, norms, principles, concepts, types of behavior, etc. Actually, the mechanism itself breeding(on a racial and national basis or on a class-political basis), which lies at the basis of totalitarianism as a sociocultural system, was born by E.K., in its depths, by its representatives, and later only extrapolated to a mass society, in Krom everything that is recognized as expedient is reproduced and forced, and everything that is dangerous for its self-preservation and development is prohibited and withdrawn (including by means of violence). Thus, totalitarian culture initially arises from the atmosphere and style, from the norms and values of the elite circle, universalizes as a kind of panacea, and then is forcibly imposed on society as a whole as an ideal model and practically takes root in the mass consciousness and societies. activities by any, including extracultural, means. In the conditions of post-totalitarian development, as well as in the context of the app. democracy, the phenomena of totalitarian culture (emblems and symbols, ideas and images, concepts and style of socialist. realism), being presented in a culturally pluralistic. context and distanced modern. reflection - purely intellectual or aesthetic - begin to function as an exotic. E.C. components and are perceived by a generation familiar with totalitarianism only from photographs and anecdotes, “strangely”, grotesquely, associatively. The components of mass culture, included in the context of E.C., act as elements of E.C.; while the components of e.k., inscribed in the context of mass culture, become components of mass culture. In the cultural paradigm of postmodernity, the components of e.k. and mass culture are used equally as ambivalent game material, and the semantic boundary between mass and e.k. turns out to be fundamentally blurred or removed; in this case, the distinction of E.k. and mass culture practically loses its meaning (retaining for the potential recipient only the allusive meaning of the cultural-genetic context). Lit.: Mills R. The ruling elite. M., 1959; Ashin G.K. The myth of the elite and "mass society". M., 1966; Davydov Yu.N. Art and the Elite. M., 1966; Davidyuk G.P., B.C. Bobrovsky. Problems of “mass culture” and “mass communications”. Minsk, 1972; Snow Ch. Two cultures. M., 1973; "Mass culture" - illusions and reality. Sat. Art. M., 1975; Ashin G.K. Criticism of modern bourgeois leadership concepts. M., 1978; Kartseva E.N. Ideological and aesthetic foundations of bourgeois "mass culture". M., 1976; Narta M. Theory of elites and politics. M., 1978; Raynov B. “Mass culture”. M., 1979; Shestakov V.P. “The Art of Trivialization”: Some Problems of “Mass Culture” // VF. 1982. No. 10; Gershkovich Z.I. Paradoxes of "mass culture" and modern ideological struggle. M., 1983; Molchanov VV Mirages of mass culture. L., 1984; Mass types and forms of art. M., 1985; Ashin G.K. Modern elite theory: critical. feature article. M., 1985; Kukarkin A.V. bourgeois mass culture. M., 1985; Smolskaya E.P. “Mass culture”: entertainment or politics? M., 1986; Shestakov V. Mythology of the XX century. M., 1988; Isupov K. G. Russian aesthetics of history. SPb., 1992; Dmitrieva N.K., Moiseeva A.P. Philosopher of the free spirit (Nikolai Berdyaev: life and work). M., 1993; Ovchinnikov V.F. Creative personality in the context of Russian culture. Kaliningrad, 1994; Phenomenology of art. M., 1996; Elite and mass in Russian artistic culture. Sat.st. M., 1996; Zimovets S. The Silence of Gerasim: Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Essays on Russian Culture. M., 1996; Afanasiev M.N. Ruling Elites and the Statehood of Post-Totalitarian Russia (Lectures). M.; Voronezh, 1996; Dobrenko E. Molding the Soviet reader. Social and aesthetic prerequisites for the reception of Soviet literature. SPb., 1997; Bellows R. Creative Leadership. Prentice-Hall, 1959; Packard V. The Status Seekers. N.Y., 1963; Weyl N. The Creative Elite in America. Wash., 1966; Spitz D. Patterns of Anti-Democratic Thought. Glencoe, 1965; Jodi M. Teorie elity a problem elity. Prague, 1968; Parry G. Political Elite. L, 1969; RubinJ. Do It! N.Y., 1970; Prewitt K., Stone A. The Ruling Elites. Elite Theory, Power and American Democracy. N.Y., 1973; Gans H.G. Popular Culture and High Culture. N.Y., 1974; Swingwood A. The Myth of Mass Culture. L., 1977; Toffler A. The Third Wave. N.Y., 1981; Ridless R. Ideology and Art. Theories of Mass Culture from W. Benjamin to U. Eco. N.Y., 1984; Shiah M. Discourse on Popular Culture. Stanford, 1989; Theory, Culture and Society. L., 1990. I. V. Kondakov. Cultural studies of the twentieth century. Encyclopedia. M.1996
Features of the production and consumption of cultural values allowed culturologists to identify two social forms of existence of culture : mass culture and elite culture.
Mass culture is a type of cultural production that is produced daily in large volumes. It is assumed that mass culture is consumed by all people, regardless of place and country of residence. Mass culture - it is the culture of everyday life, presented to the widest possible audience through various channels, including the media and communications.
Mass culture (from lat.massa- lump, piece) - a cultural phenomenon of the 20th century, generated by the scientific and technological revolution, urbanization, the destruction of local communities, the blurring of territorial and social boundaries. The time of its appearance is the middle of the 20th century, when the mass media (radio, print, television, record and tape recorder) penetrated into most countries of the world and became available to representatives of all social strata. In its proper sense, mass culture manifested itself for the first time in the United States at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The well-known American political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski liked to repeat the phrase, which became commonplace over time: “If Rome gave the world the right, England parliamentary activity, France culture and republican nationalism, then the modern USA gave the world the scientific and technological revolution and mass culture.”
The origins of the widespread dissemination of mass culture in the modern world lie in the commercialization of all social relations, while the mass production of culture is understood by analogy with the conveyor industry. Many creative organizations (cinema, design, TV) are closely associated with banking and industrial capital and are focused on the production of commercial, box office, and entertainment works. In turn, the consumption of these products is mass consumption, because the audience that perceives this culture is a mass audience of large halls, stadiums, millions of viewers of television and movie screens.
A striking example of mass culture is pop music, which is understandable and accessible to all ages, all segments of the population. It satisfies the momentary needs of people, reacts to any new event and reflects it. Therefore, samples of mass culture, in particular hits, quickly lose their relevance, become obsolete and go out of fashion. As a rule, mass culture has less artistic value than elite culture.
The purpose of mass culture is to stimulate the consumer consciousness of the viewer, listener, reader. Mass culture forms a special type of passive, non-critical perception of this culture in humans. It creates a personality that is quite easy to manipulate.
Consequently, mass culture is designed for mass consumption and for the average person, it is understandable and accessible to all ages, all segments of the population, regardless of the level of education. In social terms, it forms a new social stratum, called the "middle class".
Mass culture in artistic creativity performs specific social functions. Among them, the main one is illusory-compensatory: introducing a person to the world of illusory experience and unrealizable dreams. To do this, mass culture uses such entertainment types and genres of art as circus, radio, television; stage, hit, kitsch, slang, science fiction, action movie, detective, comics, thriller, western, melodrama, musical.
It is within the framework of these genres that simplified “versions of life” are created that reduce social evil to psychological and moral factors. And all this is combined with open or covert propaganda of the dominant way of life. Mass culture is more focused not on realistic images, but on artificially created images (image) and stereotypes. Today, the newfangled "stars of the artificial Olympus" have no less fanatical admirers than the old gods and goddesses. Modern mass culture can be international and national.
Peculiaritiesmass culture: general accessibility (comprehensibility to everyone and everyone) of cultural values; ease of perception; stereotypes created by social stereotypes, replicability, entertainment and fun, sentimentality, simplification and primitiveness, propaganda of the cult of success, a strong personality, the cult of the thirst for possession of things, the cult of mediocrity, the conventionality of primitive symbolism.
Mass culture does not express the refined tastes of the aristocracy or the spiritual searches of the people, the mechanism of its distribution is directly related to the market, and it is predominantly a priority of megacity forms of existence. The basis of the success of mass culture is people's unconscious interest in violence and eroticism.
At the same time, if we consider mass culture as a spontaneously developing culture of everyday life, which is created by ordinary people, then its positive aspects are the focus on the average norm, simple pragmatics, appeal to a huge reader, viewer and listener audience.
As the antipode of mass culture, many culturologists consider elite culture.
Elite (high) culture - the culture of the elite, intended for the upper strata of society, possessing the greatest ability for spiritual activity, a special artistic susceptibility and gifted with high moral and aesthetic inclinations.
The producer and consumer of elite culture is the highest privileged stratum of society - the elite (from the French elite - the best, selective, chosen). The elite is not only a tribal aristocracy, but that educated part of society that has a special "organ of perception" - the ability for aesthetic contemplation and artistic and creative activity.
According to various estimates, consumers of elite culture in Europe for several centuries have remained approximately the same proportion of the population - about one percent. Elite culture is, first of all, the culture of the educated and wealthy part of the population. Under the elite culture usually means a special sophistication, complexity and high quality of cultural products.
The main function of elite culture is the production of social order in the form of law, power, structures of the social organization of society, as well as the ideology that justifies this order in the forms of religion, social philosophy and political thought. An elite culture involves a professional approach to creation, and the people who create it receive a special education. The circle of consumers of elite culture is its professional creators: scientists, philosophers, writers, artists, composers, as well as representatives of highly educated strata of society, namely: frequenters of museums and exhibitions, theater-goers, artists, literary critics, writers, musicians and many others.
Elite culture is distinguished by a very high level of specialization and the highest level of social claims of the individual: love for power, wealth, fame is considered the normal psychology of any elite.
In high culture, those artistic techniques are tested that will be perceived and correctly understood by wide layers of non-professionals many years later (up to 50 years, and sometimes more). For a certain period of time, high culture not only cannot, but must remain alien to the people, it must be endured, and the viewer must mature creatively during this time. For example, the painting of Picasso, Dali or the music of Schoenberg is difficult for an unprepared person to understand even today.
Therefore, elite culture is experimental or avant-garde in nature and, as a rule, it is ahead of the level of perception of it by an averagely educated person.
With the growth of the level of education of the population, the circle of consumers of elite culture is expanding. It is this part of society that contributes to social progress, therefore “pure” art should be focused on meeting the demands and needs of the elite, and it is to it that artists, poets, and composers should turn their works. Formula of elite culture: "Art for the sake of art".
The same types of art can belong to both high and mass culture: classical music is high, and popular music is mass, Fellini films are high, and action films are mass. The organ mass of S. Bach belongs to high culture, but if it is used as a musical ringtone on a mobile phone, it is automatically included in the category of mass culture, without losing its belonging to high culture. Numerous orchestrations
Bach's performances in the style of light music, jazz or rock do not compromise high culture at all. The same applies to the Mona Lisa on a toilet soap package or a computer reproduction of it.
Features of the elite culture: focuses on "people of a genius" capable of aesthetic contemplation and artistic and creative activity, there are no social stereotypes, a deep philosophical essence and non-standard content, specialization, sophistication, experimentalism, avant-gardism, the complexity of cultural values for understanding an unprepared person, sophistication, high quality, intellectuality .
Conclusion.
1. From the point of view of scientific analysis, there is no more complete or less complete culture; these two varieties of culture are culture in the full sense of the word.
2. Elitism and mass character are only quantitative characteristics related to the number of people who are consumers of artifacts.
3. Mass culture meets the needs of people in general, and therefore reflects the real level of humanity. Representatives of the elite culture, creating something new, thereby maintain a fairly high level of general culture.
Mass ... But there is an elite one. What it is?
First of all, let's start with the definition of the concept of "elite culture". In a broad sense, elite culture (from the French elite - selective, best) is a form of culture of modern society, accessible and understandable not to everyone. But it is worth remembering that these “not all” are by no means those people who stand above others on the financial ladder. Rather, they are such refined natures, informals, who, as a rule, have their own special view of the world, a special worldview.
It is customary to oppose elite culture to mass culture. Elite and mass cultures are in a difficult interaction for a number of reasons. The main one is the collision of the idealistic and sometimes utopian philosophy of elite culture with the pragmatism, primitiveness and, perhaps, “realism” of the mass culture. Regarding why “realism” is quoted: well, you look at the modern “masterpieces” of cinema (“Ant-Man”, “Batman v Superman” ..., they don’t even smell of realism - some kind of hallucinations).
The elite culture usually opposes consumerism, "ambitious, semi-educated" and plebeianism. It is interesting to note that the culture of the elite also opposes folklore, folk culture, because it is the culture of the majority. To an inexperienced third-party reader, elitist culture may seem like something akin to snobbery or a grotesque form of aristocracy, which, of course, it is not, because it lacks the mimesis inherent in snobbery, and not only people from the upper strata of society belong to elitist culture.
Let us designate the main features of the elite culture:
creativity, innovation, the desire to create a "world for the first time";
closeness, separation from wide, general use;
"art for art's sake";
cultural development of objects, separation from the "profane" culture;
creation of a new cultural language of symbols and images;
a system of norms, a limited range of values.
What is modern elite culture? To begin with, let us briefly mention the elite culture of the past. It was something esoteric, hidden, its bearers were priests, monks, knights, members of underground circles (for example, Petrashevsky, of which F. M. Dostoevsky was a famous member), Masonic lodges, orders (for example, crusaders or members of the Teutonic Order).
Why do we turn to history? “Historical knowledge is the first means of preserving and prolonging an aging civilization,” wrote José Ortega y Gasset. Gasset's work "The Rise of the Masses" clearly illuminates the problem of "man of the masses", in which the author introduces the concept of "superman". And it is the "superman" who is the representative of modern elite culture. The elite, not surprisingly, is a minority; it is by no means "at the helm of modernity", i.e. the masses are not currently in charge of everything, but have a huge impact on the socio-political aspects of society; in my opinion, it is customary to listen to the opinion of the masses in our time.
I think that the ordinary mass almost forcibly imposes their thoughts and tastes on society, thereby causing stagnation in it. But still, according to my observations, the elite culture in our 21st century opposes the mass culture with more and more confidence. Adherence to the mainstream, as strange as it sounds, is becoming less and less popular.
In people, the desire to join the “high”, inaccessible majority is increasingly noticeable. I really want to believe that humanity is learning from the bitter experience of past centuries that the "revolt of the masses" will not take place. To prevent the absolute triumph of mediocrity, it is necessary to "return to your true self", to live with aspiration to the future.
And as proof that the elite culture is gaining momentum, I will cite as an example its most prominent representatives. In the musical field, I would like to single out the German virtuoso violinist David Garrett. He performs both classical works and modern pop music in his own arrangement.
The fact that Garrett gathers many thousands of halls with his performances does not classify him as a mass culture, because music, although it can be heard by everyone, is not accessible to any spiritual perception. Just as inaccessible to the masses is the music of the famous Alfred Schnittke.
In the visual arts, Andy Warhol can be called the most prominent representative of the elite culture. A diptych of Marilyn, a can of Campbell's soup... his works have become a real property of the public, while still belonging to an elite culture. The art of lomography, which became very popular in the nineties of the twentieth century, in my opinion, can be considered part of the elite culture, although at present there is an International Lomographic Society and associations of lomograph photographers. In general, about that, read the link.
In the 21st century, contemporary art museums began to gain popularity (for example, MMOMA, Erarta, PERMM). Very controversial, however, is the art of performance, but, in my opinion, it can safely be called elitist. And examples of artists performing in this genre are the Serbian artist Marina Abramovich, the Frenchman Vahram Zaryan, and the Petersburger Petr Pavlensky.
An example of the architecture of modern elite culture can be considered the city of St. Petersburg, which is a meeting place for different cultures, in which almost every building makes a knowledgeable person turn to an intertemporal dialogue. But still, the architecture of St. Petersburg is not modern, so let's turn to the architectural work of modern creators. For example, the Nautilus shell house by the Mexican Javier Senosian, the Louis Nyuser Library, the architects Yves Bayard and Francis Chapu, the Green Citadel by the German architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
And speaking of the literature of elite culture, one cannot fail to mention James Joyce (and his legendary novel Ulysses), which had a significant influence on Virginia Woolf and even Ernest Hemingway. Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, in my opinion, can be considered representatives of the literature of an elitist culture.
I would also like to add Gabriel Garcia Marquez to this list. "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "Love in the Time of Plague", "Remembering My Sad Whores"... the works of the Spanish Nobel Prize winner are undoubtedly very popular in elite circles. If we talk about modern literature, I would like to name Svetlana Aleksievich, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, whose works, although recognized by the literary (and not only) community, their meaning is still not available to most people.
So, you need to have a huge supply of "keys" to understanding the elite culture, knowledge that can help interpret the work of art in full. Every day to see St. Isaac's Cathedral, driving along the Palace Bridge, and to perceive it as a dome against the background of the sky is one thing. But when looking at the same cathedral, recalling the history of its creation, associating it with an example of late classicism in architecture, thereby referring to St. Petersburg in the 19th century, to the people who lived at that time, entering into a dialogue with them through time and space is completely different. case.
© Shchekin Ilya
Editing Andrey Puchkov
Elite culture- this is "high culture", opposed to mass culture by the type of influence on the perceiving consciousness, preserving its subjective features and providing a meaning-forming function. Its main ideal is the formation of consciousness, ready for active transformative activity and creativity in accordance with the objective laws of reality. Historically, elite culture arose as the antithesis of mass culture and its meaning, the main value shows in comparison with the latter.
The essence of elite culture was first analyzed by X. Ortega y Gasset and K. Manheim. The subject of an elitist, high culture is a person - a free, creative person capable of conscious activity. The creations of this culture are always personally colored and designed for personal perception, regardless of the breadth of their audience, which is why the wide distribution and millions of copies of the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare not only do not reduce their significance, but, on the contrary, contribute to the wide dissemination of spiritual values. In this sense, the subject of an elite culture is a representative of the elite.
Elite culture is a culture of privileged groups of society, characterized by fundamental closeness, spiritual aristocracy and value-semantic self-sufficiency. According to I. V. Kondakov, elite culture appeals to a select minority of its subjects, who, as a rule, are both its creators and addressees (in any case, the circle of both is almost the same).
Elite culture consciously and consistently opposes the culture of the majority in all its historical and typological varieties - folklore, folk culture, the official culture of a particular estate or class, the state as a whole, the cultural industry of the technocratic society of the 20th century. and so on.
Philosophers consider elite culture as the only one capable of preserving and reproducing the basic meanings of culture and having a number of fundamentally important features:
- complexity, specialization, creativity, innovation;
- the ability to form consciousness, ready for active transformative activity and creativity in accordance with the objective laws of reality;
- the ability to concentrate the spiritual, intellectual and artistic experience of generations;
- the presence of a limited range of values recognized as true and "high";
- a rigid system of norms accepted by this stratum as obligatory and strict in the community of "initiates";
- individualization of norms, values, evaluative criteria of activity, often principles and forms of behavior of members of the elite community, thereby becoming unique;
- the creation of a new, deliberately complicated cultural semantics, requiring special training and an immense cultural outlook from the addressee;
- using a deliberately subjective, individually creative, "deleting" interpretation of the ordinary and familiar, which brings the subject's cultural assimilation of reality closer to a mental (sometimes artistic) experiment on it and, to the extreme, replaces the reflection of reality in an elitist culture with its transformation, imitation - with deformation, penetration into the meaning - conjecture and rethinking of the given;
- semantic and functional “closeness”, “narrowness”, isolation from the whole national culture, which turns the elite culture into a kind of secret, sacred, esoteric knowledge, taboo for the rest of the masses, and its carriers turn into a kind of “priests” of this knowledge, the chosen ones of the gods , "servants of the muses", "keepers of secrets and faith", which is often played up and poeticized in elite culture.
The concept of subculture and counterculture
Subculture is a specific way of life, it is the realization of a person's need for self-expression, for personal development, for satisfying the sense of beauty, for understanding one's purpose in the world. Subcultures appear regardless of politics, economics. Material needs, their quantity and quality associated with living conditions, cannot be essential to determine the reasons why a youth subculture appears.
