Lowbrow, Highbrow, and the Categorization of Art Selina Lai
Is comparing popular literature and canonical art still "mixing crap-apples and Sunkist oranges: fruitless at best, incommensurable at worst"?
In today's global arena, where literary texts and publications are so widely available with the use of internet, cable and satellite connection, Hollywood production, and other means of communication, culture has simply become too "variegated, too complex, too human to be tied to one explanatory device." [17] Stephen King's web publishing, the many multi-authored texts and authorless novels on the World Wide Web, etc. are just a few to name which have blurred the distinction of the two literary spectrums more than ever.
The continuous argument on what is high/low art in the contemporary is vividly seen in the highly mixed reception of the 78th Oscars winning best song-"It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." Sparking controversies left and right, this "lowbrow" winner aroused the most trenchant praise and vehement condemnation immediately after the announcement of the result. A piece that was demeaned by some as "the worst part about the Oscars," and lauded by others as a well-deserved art, the core argument seems to be less about what is good music rather than whether such strong infiltration of the hip-hop culture into mainstream society has once again created a fear of "Africanizing" the white nation. [18]
More interestingly though, is the variegated opinions the winning song receives even within the black community. Whereas it goes without saying that the prizewinner has brought pride to many black Americans, a ninth grade African American teacher considers her students "brainwashed by today's rap music," and that those "brothas" and "sistas" rapping on stage are performing "a modern day minstrel show." [19] Having to categorize this type of art thus involves not only judgment of the oeuvre itself, but the matter of race and its intrinsic relations to the regime of power-politics and political correctness. On the other hand, for those who either denounced rap music as the "voices of gangsters and criminals" or popularized it as a trend-mongering fad, they might have failed to look behind some of the lyricism which in fact contains highly literate rhymes. [20] Inheriting the oral tradition of the African race and features of blues dating back to the plantation period in the American South, rap music is a continuous re-presentation of black experience in America. Such compelling art-making, with inter-textual and inter-referential kind of language, gives rise to a new type of poetry which connotes the creator's power to "polish his lines until their highbrow aesthetics disappeared behind the entertaining fa_ade." [21]
In the world of modern fiction, where the extent of one's artistic territory is often obscured by interweaving influences, borrowings, imitations, and appropriations, Swirski concludes that popular literature "requires to be scrutinized most closely." He believes that this type of art is "by now the master currency for cultural transactions as well as a new constellation of myths and metaphors capable of helping us negotiate the experience of the (post)industrial age." Calling for a curriculum which honors popular fictions as works of art with "analyses of aesthetic nuance, art-historical context, and symbolic and socio-ethical content," From Lowbrow to Nobrow breaks from traditional academic discussion of popular art and the literary canon. [22]
Selina Lai teaches in the American Studies Programme at the University of Hong Kong. She holds degrees from the University of Heidelberg, Germany (M.A., American Studies) and the University of Hong Kong (B.A., English and Comparative Literature). She is particularly interested in twentieth-century American literature, and has published in Magill's Survey of American Literature (ed. Tracy Irons-Georges), the International Fiction Review, the Fourth International Hawaii Conference on Arts and Humanities Proceedings, and the forthcoming Encyclopedia of the Culture Wars (ed. Roger Chapman).