A brilliant article by one of my favorite writers, Joseph Epstein, on the passing of High Culture.
What Epstein does in this article is remind those of us old enough to remember the time before the hippy revolution, that there were three cultures: High, Medium and Popular.
High culture was based on a knowledge of the arts, literature and history of the past. It was complex, humane and based on a pyramid of knowledge. It included a reverence for Greek philosophy, European chamber and orchestral music and most art post 1400ce as well are major English, European and Russian literature.
Middle culture was created and covered in the Reader’s Digest and educational television. Popular culture needs no explanation.
So where did it go? Very simply, middle culture disappeared when High Culture disappeared because it was derivative. The disappearance of the arts is different from the rest of High Culture.
I explain the disappearance of High Culture art in this blog. Simply: the world around us has become so extraordinarily beautiful in architecture, technology, sound, taste and smell that a distinct High Culture of Art can not be continued. Though the previous cultural artifacts and creations remain as distinct art.
The rest of High Culture forms, Literature and Theatre have succumbed to a different issue. Literature is no longer taught as literature appreciation; it is now a highly politicized subject matter analyzed by a morbid class of academia that thinks only in Marxian terms. It has a deep hatred of commerce that makes the teaching irrelevant to the lives of current students.
The same disfiguration has swallowed theatre and all its accompanying arts. The only such art being produced is Marxist hate. There are no artists creating and writing about the miracles of commerce and celebrating the pro commerce aspects of life that are now the core of meaning to living beings. A full life is a full appreciation of modernity. That doesn’t exist in art, so their can be no such thing as High Art or High Culture.
High Culture may return someday. First it requires artists who create with a pro commerce love and a love of modernity. Second, it also requires and an academy with a similar appreciation.