Abstract
ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has argued that the concept of highbrow culture is undergoing radical changes, both in content and modes of appropriation. We introduce a new layer to this debate by bringing to the fore the format of the cultural product, distinguishing between “live” cultural products (concerts, exhibitions, live shows) and “recordings” (distributable items such as books or music albums). Using culture sections of newspapers (The Guardian, Le Monde, ABC, El País, Helsingin Sanomat, Dagens Nyheter) from 1960 to 2010 (n = 11,775) we ask what role the format of the cultural product plays for the highbrow/non-highbrow trajectories over time. We show that highbrow coverage faces a relative decline, mostly explained by the expanding non-highbrow arts coverage. Moreover, coverage on live events decreases, while coverage of recordings grows. This trend reflects the highbrow/non-highbrow divide, revealing that the “decline of the highbrow” phenomenon is under closer scrutiny a “decline of the highbrow live event”.
Highlights
Knowledge about and mastery of highbrow arts have traditionally been understood to be important conveyors of power and status in modern Western societies (Bourdieu, 1984; Levine, 1988)
We argue that the format of the cultural product could be one key of understanding better the trajectories of highbrow and non-highbrow arts
Taken together, the share of non-highbrow art coverage slowly increases at the cost of highbrow coverage
Summary
Knowledge about and mastery of highbrow arts have traditionally been understood to be important conveyors of power and status in modern Western societies (Bourdieu, 1984; Levine, 1988). Our main research question is: What role does the format of the cultural product play in the trajectories of highbrow and non-highbrow culture across time in quality newspapers?. In order to assess the long-term trend between the format of the cultural product and its highbrow/non-highbrow status, we use a content analysis of cultural coverage of six European newspapers over a period of fifty years, from 1960 to 2010. Logistic regression allows us to formally test the magnitude and statistical significance of the interaction effect between the decade and the format of the cultural product on the prevalence of highbrow arts (versus non-highbrow arts) as the main topic of the articles In other words, this analysis reveals whether the trend in highbrow coverage is similar between the live and recording-based cultural products. The categories and distributions of all independent variables are presented in Appendix B
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