Buffy: High or Popular Culture?

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NicolaPT

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If high culture is regarded as art, and popular culture is the lower end of culture- where does that put Buffy?

Is the programme high or popular culture? Or does it not really fit in either?

I'm writing a paper on BtVS and would really like to hear your opinions!
 
I think high and popular culture has been bleeding together the last few decades, especially. Although it's been happening a long while really. Movies and television as media are doing that. I think American culture tends to encourage the blur in many respects. For example, different forms of music coming together, folk, jazz, blues, classical....

"Postmodern" art, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein really got that moving in the visual arts, 1960s. High art commenting on mass-produced, consumer culture, "low art".

Buffy continues the high/low, postmodern mix, referencing Shakespeare, Spider-Man and everything in between. It's basically pop-culture, "low art". But, it's more culturally significant and meaningful than a lot of "avant garde" visual art these days.
 
nerd4hire
nerd4hire
Well put
I think I'd label it "cult" which I'd define as the high brow end of popular culture; sort of a combination.

I think goldenboy is right when he says high and popular culture are mixing. I think that perhaps film and tv-series are too young media to be considered as art. Maybe a 100 years from now, Buffy will be included in the same art-cannon that also includes Shakespeare and the two Homer's (the ancient Greek one and Mr. Simpson). If you look at the history of the novel, which is a relatively new art form too, in it's early period it was considered a very low brow form of art and look where it is now.
 
Novels were low art, Jazz was hated, feared "low" art...maybe the jury's still out on rock 'n roll, lol. Things evolve, are refined.

Classical music has a tradition of borrowing, incorporating folk melodies....

It's interesting. Starting in the 1950s, you'd have TV variety shows that would have an incredibly wide-ranging mix: Opera singers, Russian acrobats, vaudeville comedians, rock 'n roll performers...it was all just thrown out there...TV was a bastard medium from the start. Playhouse 90, I love Lucy...all over the place...

You don't see much opera or ballet on American broadcast TV anymore. (public television, yes...but no one watches PBS, lol.). TV has become much cruder and more sophisticated at the same time. HBO type shows"”rough language, sex, violence...yet modern TV is often very richly layered, complex, subtle. Often very realistic, credible characters...

Buffy started as a very smart teen show and just got better, more sophisticated...began to reach for really big, mythic themes, artistry...
 
I think a lot of movies/tv are art. Take Pulp Fiction or Battlestar Galactica. Pop culture, but beautifully made. Or in Pulp Fiction's case, bloodily made.
 
I think it is pop-culture. i think it is better than the rest of the pop-culture crap out there, and probably CULT is an appropriate label.
 
I like Goldenboy's take on this. Also I think it should be pointed they already teach Buffy in some universities. Symposiums have been held where professors travelled to discuss it.
 
I think Charles Dickens would have created amazing, hugely popular TV shows were he alive today. He was fond of the serialized drama, right?

TV really started getting more respect in the 90s. And now for some, it's preferred over film"”the way you can spend a such a long time with characters, see them evolve...

Like I say, I feel like the culture (even popular culture) is actually cruder, less complex today in some ways. We think of Victorian language as very flowery and ornate. But it was often actually more precise and varied and elegant. Joss-speak is like clever creative destruction, reflecting the state of Western, American postmod culture, for better or worse...

It's an interesting topic. Is today's low culture cruder than low cultures of the past? I don't really know. Seems like it's harder to define (the blur factor). Modern technology and techniques can make things really pretty, lovely for the camera. Maybe it's just different...is Western Civ truly in decline? Maybe...dunno...
 
goldenboy said:
I think Charles Dickens would have created amazing, hugely popular TV shows were he alive today. He was fond of the serialized drama, right?
Click to expand...
Absolutely spot on GB. You only have to have seen the BBC's excellent adaptation of Bleak House to understand how true your comment is...highly recommended btw.
 
Yeah, Bleak House was just on PBS in the States. I missed most of it, dang it all...miss seeing Gillian Anderson on the screen.

They'll run it again. Or better yet, it's DVD time...
 
Not to say that Buffy hasn't had its share of critical acclaim-a lot of praise was given to the show by drama critics and so on while it was still being produced and since. But for those many people who dismiss it as "pop culture" we should remember that the perspective on high art changes with time. In painting the French Impressionists were held in contempt by the high art establishment in their own day, today their works are fervently sought after by that same establishment. Photography was rejected as art by many artists for decades, now few people dispute that the work of Ansel Adams is exactly that.

Stuff like Impressionist painting might not have come down to be appreciated by the art establishment today if it hadn't struck a chord with other sectors of its contemporary population. Indeed I remember learning in school that most of those works are now outside of France, the country where most of it was created. Certainly not all popular culture will survive, much of it will be forgotten but historically I think there is no shortage of examples to be found where the masses led the experts. A lot of television shows will be forgotten but I think Buffy will be remembered.
 
Well, that's just it, isn't it? Some will always use "pop culture" as a term of derision. Art so often bubbles up from the bottom. All the energy, movement that forces innovation is so often on the low end, the outside. Academies, establishments are inherently conservative, sometimes stagnant, political, petty...

There is great value in conservatism, maintaining rigorous standards, traditions...quality. With vital, exciting art, it's like a balancing act. Buffy was exciting cos it paid tribute to so much that is good in traditional drama...yet made something exciting, fresh...relevant.
 
Another example for you -

In Elizabethan times the plays of Shakespeare were written as popular entertainment, enjoyed by the ordinary working stiffs. Nowadays Shakespeare is regarded as great literature. Personally, I think he's both 🙂
 
Sex Pistols Reject Hall Of Fame
http://www.stereogum.com/archives/002352.html

Sometimes, trying to refine, institutionalize something takes away its power, its life. Just depends on your aesthetic, what you're trying to achieve.

Buffy became more refined in every sense. It lost something and gained something as the lighting and production values improved.

Seems like being crude and rough, "natural" is a fairly recently valued characteristic in high culture. In terms of visual art, I'm thinking around the time of the Realists and the Impressionists"”Modernism, 19th Century...
 
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