Elite Art Research Articles

Гулаг: От Мифотворчества к Изучению

SUMMARY: This article discusses the methodological problems of Gulag studies and suggests directions for future research. While the older tradition of viewing the Gulag primary as a repressive institution has been left behind, this conceptual framework continues to influence contemporary academic conceptualizations and representations. Current studies often fail to appreciate the social complexity and cultural diversity of the Gulag, as well as the mobility of the system. The application of such outdated categories of analysis contributes to the constant mythologizing of the Gulag. The problem of the Gulag’s social complexity is often underappreciated in the academic literature, because the unique social and cultural milieu that existed in the camps and that consisted of many interesting subcultures – such as the criminal culture dating back to Odessa of the 1910s and 1920s, peasant culture, the “high” culture of the Soviet artistic elite, and finally, ethnic subcultures – has been reduced to a vision formed mainly on the basis of the memoirs of a few prominent political prisoners. In order to get beyond the old mythologies, Klimkova argues that we must bring to the forefront many previously unheard voices. Arguing that we must connect the study of Gulag culture to both the broader framework of Soviet modernization and the narrower framework of “Soviet society in a microcosm,” Klimkova outlines possible approaches (from oral history and cultural studies) that, in light of the critical review of the current literature and sources, might be used to enrich the social and cultural history of the Gulag. The article suggests how such a cultural study of the Gulag – embedded with a more comparative approach as well as a broader understanding of the Gulag as an inherent part of the history of Soviet civilization – can contribute to the study of the driving forces of the Soviet modernization project.

Trustees of Culture: Power, Wealth, and Status on Elite Arts Boards. By Francie Ostrower. University of Chicago Press, 2002. 133 pp. Cloth, $35.00

Journal Article Trustees of Culture: Power, Wealth, and Status on Elite Arts Boards.By Francie Ostrower. University of Chicago Press, 2002. 133 pp. Cloth, $35.00 Get access Marilyn Rueschemeyer Marilyn Rueschemeyer Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 82, Issue 2, December 2003, Pages 852–854, https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2004.0025 Published: 01 December 2003

Book Review: Francie Ostrower, Trustees of Culture: Power, Wealth, and Status on Elite Arts Boards, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002, 130 pp., bibliography, notes, index, $35.00 (hbk)

Book Review: Francie Ostrower, Trustees of Culture: Power, Wealth, and Status on Elite Arts Boards, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002, 130 pp., bibliography, notes, index, $35.00 (hbk)

Trustees of Culture: Power, Wealth, and Status on Elite Arts Boards

Trustees of Culture: Power, Wealth, and Status on Elite Arts Boards

Paradoxes and contradictions in government approaches to contemporary cultural policy: an Australian perspective1

: Globalisation poses interesting challenges but does not undermine the ability of government to make decisions about cultural policy at a state, national or regional level. On the contrary, government has never been so active in cultural matters, adding support for lifestyle and cultural infrastructure to existing concerns with traditional arts forms. The dilemma for government, rather, is to find a rationale for an increasingly fragmented approach to state intervention on cultural matters. The model provided by contemporary economic policy, which favours industry development over individual projects, has some salience, and has encouraged a new emphasis on cultural industries. But the industry development approach cannot resolve fundamental issues around popular and elite arts. Using Australian case studies, this paper explores the competing logics of much cultural policy—and the likelihood government will live with inconsistency rather than pay the price of choosing one policy approach over all others.

Rare and commonplace flowers: the story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares

A Stonewall Honor Book of the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table and Commonplace Flowers performs an invaluable service: unforgettably memorializing the remarkable Lota de Macedo Soares, and in the process filling in a crucial gap in Bishop's biography. This book honors a deeply moving love between two brilliant women: each highly public, a celebrity in her own nation; each deeply private, and happy (for a time) in the fragile heaven of their home.-The New York Times Book Review As a portrait of Lota and Bishop in Brazil, Rare and Commonplace Flowers is a rare and illuminating book.-Women's Review of Books Novelist Oliveira's engaging dual biography tells of [Bishop and Soares's] 'long and sad' relationship...This book offers a new perspective on the American poet, and the love story between these two women is undeniably intense and tragic. Recommended.-Library Journal Rare and Commonplace Flowers tells the story of two fascinating and controversial women. Elizabeth Bishop, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, sought artistic inspiration in Brazil. There she fell in love with Lota de Macedo Soares, a self-trained Brazilian architect. This dual biography-brilliantly researched, and written in a lively, novelistic style-follows their relationship from 1951 to 1967, the time when the two lived together in Brazil. A tale of two artists and two cultures, Rare and Commonplace Flowers offers unique perspectives on both women and their work. Carmen L. Oliveira provides an unparalleled level of detail and insight, due to both her familiarity with Brazil and her access to the country's artistic elite, many of whom had a direct connection with Bishop and Soares. Rare pictures of the two artists and their home bring this unique story to life. Carmen L. Oliveira is a Brazilian novelist. Neil K. Besner is a professor in the English department at the University of Winnipeg in Canada.

Horace Pippin and the African American Vernacular

y most informed estimations, Horace Pippin is one of the most important African American visual artists of the twentieth century. During relatively brief career as an artist, Pippin produced some one hundred paintings and a number of burnt wood panels on themes as varied as war, family and community life, religion, and nature. In their mammoth study, A History of African American Artists, Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson attribute Pippin's success to the fact that his need to organize and express the reality of life visually cut through all impediments so directly and profoundly that he arrived at concepts in painting that were extremely modern (356). Whether it was ability to produce modernist images or exotic style, as others claim, Pippin's work was immediately embraced by art historians and connoisseurs from the moment that it was brought to public attention. Since the late 1930s, when work was first shown, Pippin has been one of the most often exhibited African American visual artists. In addition, works are still avidly sought out by private collectors and museums. Today, works hang in the homes of many prominent Americans and are part of the permanent collections of major museums across the country including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Phillips Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and others (Bearden and Henderson 356; S. Wilson 3). From these obvious signs of extraordinary accomplishment in the visual arts as evidenced in embrace by representatives of the elite art world, one might be inclined to conclude that Horace Pippin enjoys a secure place alongside other masters of American visual art. When one

Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1898-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy

Raack !Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1889-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy R. C. Raack, Professor Emeritus California State University- Hayward Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1898-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy "Cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. The task is to take it into our hands." Joseph Stalin, 1924 Stalin Eisenstein With these words, Stalin entered on a task that he would, within a few years, wholly accomplish. He sought to capture the new forces of technology, the moving picture among them, to help him realize the domestic and yet grander dreams ofhis Party, and of his recently deceased spiritual mentor, V. I. Lenin.1 Stalin, with a few years, took the Soviet cinema, its makers, and Lenin's Bolshevik party wholly into his hands. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was the Russian cinematographer who, perhaps as much as any other practitioner of the arts, suffered tragically the depredations Stalin effected on his work and in his personal life. Not a few of his contemporary artists and literateurs, just as famous as he, were executed or died in the Gulag. Eisenstein had, in his youth, subscribed to the program of the Bolsheviks, producing heavily political films like Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Ten Days that Shook the World (1928) to propagandize the cause. These films came well before the dreary conformity soon imposed by Stalin, through his cultural tsars, was set firmly in place as a kind of opaque ceiling above individual creative imagination. In his later career (he died in 1948, aged 50), Eisenstein was to be effectively entrapped in the Kremlin boss's ukases that narrowly prescribed the propaganda directions of Soviet cinema. Stalin constantly meddled in every aspect of Soviet creative life, cinema being perhaps his favorite amateur playground . His continuing program of arrests, imprisoments, and executions of citizens of all walks of life brought terror to the entire society,—including the creative elite. When he demanded films celebrating national heroes, Eisenstein, after being publicly mauled in 1936 and 1937 for countless infractions of the rules of Soviet artistic expression, was offered what was in effect the redeeming task of revivifying in film an antique Russian hero, Alexander Nevsky (1938). This opportunity to exculpate himself by plunging into another politically risky production followed the shredding ofhis almost completed film Bezhin Meadow. That he had to endure while pathetically apologizing for his alleged misdemeanors . A few years later, when Stalin saw himself victorious in war after takingover large neighboring territories, Eisenstein was called in to reproduce in film the story of another Russian conqueror, Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny, part 1 [1945, commissioned in early 1941]). It is likely that Eisenstein was, in some ways, more vulnerable to being caught up in the dictator's whims than most members of the elite.2 The executioner's blade cut close to Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, but, though it took some out of the ranks of the Soviet artistic elite personally 48 I Film & History Eisenstein Anniversary Essays | Film & Politics close to him, he was spared—not, perhaps, unaccountably , given his international reputation and the effectiveness of his films at conveying the Soviet message abroad. Now, one hundred years after the birth of the great cinematographer, some heretofore far less known aspects of his artistic biography as it intertwined contemporary Soviet cultural history, and even diplomatic history, should be told. What should amaze those only familiar with Eisenstein's major film work is the level of professional engagement of this artist in every imaginative, and even scholarly, task of production, whatever he did. In his short life of political restriction and drastically limited opportunities he was only able to complete few productions (six major films, one in two parts—albeit all grand international successes). Some ofhis oeuvre was in fact cancelled while in production or, like Bezhin Meadow, the worst case, actually physically destroyed. One vitally important cinema work, Que viva Mexico^ was wholly emasculated in Hollywood as a result ofa tragicomedy of ill will, lack of communication, lack ofbudgeting experience and fiscal discipline on Eisenstein's part.3 Most writers have in the past highly sung Eisenstein's glory as a filmmaker, overlooking the close political...

The Holiday Yards of Florencio Morales: "El Hombre de las Banderas"

Art and Artists: The Series The Holiday Yards of Florencio Morales: El Hombre de las Banderas. By Amy V. Kitchener. 1994. Pp. 72. $29.50 (cloth); $15.95 (paper) Santeria Garments and Altar Speaking Without a Voice By Ysamur Flores-Pena and Roberta J. Evanchuk. 1994. Pp. 72. $29.50 (cloth); $15.95 (paper) Americana Crafted: Jehu Camper Delaware Whittler. By Robert D. Bethke. 1995. Pp. 71. $32.50 (cloth); $16.95 (paper) Chain-Saw Sculptor: The Art of J. Chester Skip Armstrong. By Sharon R Sherman. 1995. Pp. 72. $29.50 (cloth); $15.95 (paper) Chicano Graffiti and Murals: The Neighborhood Art of Peter Quezada. By Sojin Kim. 1995. Pp. 72. $32.50 (cloth); $16.95 (paper) Earls Art Shop: Building Art with Earl Simmons. By Stephen Flinn Young and D. C. Young. 1995. Pp. 72. $32.50 (cloth); $16.95 (paper) Punk and Neo-Tribal Body Art. By Daniel Wojcik. 1995. Pp. 72. $29.95 (cloth), $15.95 (paper) Sew to Speak: The Fabric Art of Mary Milne. By Linda Pershing. 1995. Pp. 72. $29.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper) Vietnam Remembered: The Art of Marine Combat Veteran Michael D. Cousino, Sr.. By Varick A. Chittenden. 1995. Pp. 72. $29.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper) Home Is Where the Dog Is: Art in the Back Yard. By Karen E. Burgess. 1996 . Pp. 72. $35 (cloth); $17.95 (paper) Birds in Wood: The Carvings of Andrew Zergenyi. By Melissa Ladenheim. 1996. Pp. 72. $35 (cloth); $17.95 (paper) All volumes published by University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MI. The University Press of Mississippi began its Folk Art and Artists series in 1994, with a number of monographs planned dealing with a broad range of creative arts. These books are short case studies, usually comprised of around 40 pages of text, followed by approximately 30 pages of color plates. Each monograph is meant to be a brief case study of a particular tradition, intended for a general readership. Reviewing books that are part of a series can be a different task than reviewing each book separately; instead of merely listing the contents, strengths and weaknesses of each volume, it is more useful to find common links that indicate why the series is important, what are the overall strengths of the volumes, and how an editor might have shaped what was finally chosen for inclusion. These are my intentions here. The Folk Art and Artists Series, Western Folklore 55 (Winter, 1997):85-98 85 started in 1994 under the Editorship of Michael Owen Jones, has a clear mission statement as expressed adjacent the title page of each volume: Books in this series focus on the work of informally trained or selftaught artists rooted in regional, occupational, ethnic, racial, or genderspecific traditions. Authors explore the influence of artists' experiences and aesthetic values upon the art they create, the process of creation, and the cultural traditions that served as inspiration or personal resource. The wide range of art forms featured in this series reveals the importance of aesthetic expression in our daily lives and gives striking testimony to the richness and vitality of art and tradition in the modern world. This series, not surprisingly, shows the influence of Jones' behavioral view of artistic activity in the choice of who and what is studied (Jones 1993). These choices logically fall under specific categories: What can be considered art? What are the characteristics of the makers? What role does art play in the everyday life of the maker? In these volumes, art clearly is not something from a disappearing past, but is a quite vibrant activity in late twentieth-century America. However, some of these studies inadvertently perpetuate the notion that art somehow resembles folk versions of elite art. Seven of the books deal with wooden sculptural forms: Earl Simmons's making of toys; Michael Cousino's diorama sculptures of his Vietnam experiences; Jehu Camper's whittled scenes of his Delaware farm life; Chester Armstrong's chainsaw sculpture; the carved birds of Andrew Zergenyi; the yard art of Florencio Morales and Carlton Burgess. …

The Canonization of Warner Brothers Cartoons, or How Bugs Bunny Came to the Museum of Modern Art

In 1985, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the first major art museum in the United States to launch an extended exhibition of art works from the cartoons produced by the Brothers studio. Entitled Warner Bros. Cartoons Golden Jubilee, it opened with a black tie invitation-only tribute to surviving animation directors Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng in September and continued into January 1986 with 17 programs of cartoons screened as weekend matinees. The physical installation, called That's Not All, Folks, consisted of handsomely framed animation cels, background art, character sketches, and video monitors showing interviews with Brothers artists. In addition, Jones drew on the walls such stars as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig, giving running commentaries on the exhibit itself. Sharing sponsorship of the exhibit were Brothers1 Licensing Corporation of America, and ABC Television, whose commercial tie-ins included videocassettes, character merchandise, and television shows (Putzer 22). The Brothers exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art typifies how popular and elite art worlds negotiate profitability and cultural authority in selecting certain items of popular culture for aesthetic and economic appreciation. The key negotiators for this exhibit were the curators, the corporate representatives, and the arts journalists who provided news coverage and critical reviews. In contrast, the role of the artists in the negotiations was quite limited and peripheral; their cooperation was beneficial but unnecessary to the proceedings. In order to examine the roles of the above art world participants in the exhibit, I turn to Howard Becker's Art Worlds, which provides a framework drawn from occupational sociology. He distinguishes among art world members on the basis of their commitments to the activities necessary to sustain cycles of artistic production and consumption, e.g. commitments of time, labor, money, professional reputation, and artistic training (2-5). Becker states that competition for limited resources requires individuals to cooperate in forming social organizations to better claim those resources and to deny legitimacy to other claimants (134-5). When such organizations as art schools, galleries, museums, journals, and arts patrons make demands on those with whom they share their resources, they also offer an opportunity to invest in their traditions and reputations (93-130). These investments may cause some members to identify with the organization of which they are a part, even if theirs is only a temporary alliance (81-2). Pierre Bourdieu argues that these investments are exposed in expressions of taste, which classify the classifier (6). Critics perform this role professionally, stating openly what connoisseurs merely need imply through consumption, namely, the evaluative criteria by which they judge. Ideally, the critics' orientations to the reader, the artist, and the art world in which they work reveal the institutional investments they have made; however, they are likely to be reticent about those investments made in them by organizations seeking favorable reviews because that would call into question the independence of their judgments (English 99-107). In order to examine the role of critics in this particular exhibit, it is helpful first to look at some reviews of Brothers animation compilation features that were released in the preceding years. The first compilation, Bugs Bunny Superstar (1975), garnered the most positive press among newspaper writers, who often mentioned the chance it offered for adults to enjoy these classic cartoons on the big screen (Dyer; Gross; Hartl). Reviewers noted the brashness of the characters, the pointed parodies of the Oscar ceremonies and Disney's Fantasia, the quality of the full animation, and the wide ranging sources of humor (Canby; Nachman; McCollum). They also bemoaned the bland assembly line of Saturday morning limited animation in contrast to the vividness of the old Brothers cartoons (Bugs Bunny; Hammen; Reviving Warners' Wacky Wabbit). …

Notes from prison

When they visited me in prison they would always emphasise that the case was in their hands, that the judges, the prosecution, the whole system was subordinate to them. Nobody can live on a salary, they said. This is the free market. Everyone has to find other means to survive: bribes, business interests, protection rackets… They were pretty convincing about their unlimited power. When I asked them about the practicalities of controlling the judiciary, the two FSS men rocked with laughter. First you have to ‘work’ on them, they volunteered cheerfully, catch them out when they're not on the level. Then you take them aside and paint their future in the darkest possible terms — if they're exposed. By then they'll be sweating and ready to do anything to ensure that the FSS preserve their reputation. Then you sweeten them up. After that they'll be only too keen to show their gratitude. They'll be under threat of compromise for life. It had taken me a long time to understand why the two FSS men had kept so ‘sweetly’ persuading me to give them information about drug-taking among children of politicians, financiers, and the artistic elite. They laughed, as ever. ‘It's dynamite,’ they said. ‘You can get anyone by the throat if you threaten to compromise their children. After all,’ they said, amazed at my inability to understand these elementary things, ‘the elections are coming.’

Facing facts: realism in American thought and culture, 1850-1920

A true poem, Walt Whitman proclaimed in 1852, daily newspaper-and American culture was never same again. Like a blast of cold air in a stuffy drawing room, Whitman's campaign to give artistic representation to gritty reality shocked genteel artistic elite of 1850s; but brassy poet's efforts helped generate a revolution in American life and thought. Four decades later, Willa Cather could declare demands realism, and they will have it. In Facing Facts, David Shi provides most comprehensive history to date of rise of realism in American culture. He vividly captures character and sweep of this all-encompassing movement-ranging from Winslow Homer to rise of Ash Can school, from Whitman to Henry James to Theodore Dreiser. He begins with a look at idealist atmosphere of antebellum years, when otherwordly themes were considered only fit subject for art (Hawthorne wrote the grosser life is a dream, and spiritual life is a reality). Whitman's assault on these standards coincided with sweeping changes in American society: bloody Civil War, aggressive advance of a modern scientific spirit, popularity of photography, expansion of cities, capitalism, and middle class-all worked to shake foundations of genteel idealism and sentimental romanticism. Both artists and public developed an ever-expanding appetite for hard facts, and for art accurately depicted them. As Shi proceeds through nineteenth century, he traces realist revolution in each major area of arts and letters, combining an astute analysis of movement's essential themes with incisive portraits of its leading practitioners. Here we see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., shaken to stern realism by horrors of Civil War; influence of Walt Whitman on painter Thomas Eakins and architect Louis Sullivan, a leader of Chicago school; local-color verisimilitude of Louisa May Alcott and Sarah Orne Jewett; and impact of urban squalor on intrepid young writers such as Stephen Crane. In process of surveying nineteenth-century cultural history, Shi provides fascinating insights into specific concerns of realist movement-in particular, nation's growing obsession with gender roles. Realism, he writes, was in many respects an effort to revive masculine virtues in face of declining virility. During twentieth century, a new modernist sensibility challenged now-orthodox tenets of realism: Is it not time, one critic asked, that we renounce heresy it is function of art to record a fact? Shi examines why so many Americans answered yes to this question, under influences ranging from psychoanalysis to First World War. Nuanced, detailed, and comprehensive, Facing Facts provides definitive account of realist phenomenon, revealing why it played so great a role in American cultural history, and why it retains its perennial fascination.

Brushes with power: modern politics and the Chinese art of calligraphy

Chinese calligraphy has traditionally been an emblem of the ruling class and its authority. After a century of mass revolution, what is the fate of this elite art? Richard Kraus explores the relationship beween politics and the art of writing in China today to explicate the complex relationship between tradition and modernity in Chinese culture. His study draws upon a wide range of sources, from political documents, memoirs, and interviews with Chinese intellectuals to art exhibitions and television melodramas. Mao Zedong and other Communist leaders gave calligraphy a revolutionary role, believing that their beloved art reflected the luster of authoritative words and deeds. Calligraphy was joined with new propagandistic mass media to become less a private art and more a public performance. It provided politically engaged citizens with subtle cues to changing power relationships in the People's Republic. Claiming neither that the Communists obliterated traditional culture nor that revolution failed to relieve the burden of China's past, this study subtly examines the changing uses of tradition in a modernizing society.

The invention of American tradition

Major American beliefs about the pre-American environment were all created successively as myths after settlement in each ecological zone. Taken together, these beliefs constitute the grand tradition of the pristine wilderness—a wild American nature, far tougher to conquer than it ever was in reality. To exaggerate the conquering American achievement further, the role of native Americans in transforming the pre-American environment was denied, as was their humanity and cultural adaptability. The conquering heroes were superhuman, self-glorifying Americans: pioneers who transformed the pristine wilderness into a Jeffersonian garden of American yeomen following a Turnerian frontier conflict that left Americans deeply scarred by, and hostile to, the environment but also fashioned by it into a people of unique national character and institutions. The main period of American mythmaking was the middle and late nineteenth century in which the entire body of traditions was either invented or refashioned. Four types of invented traditions are recognized: instant traditions invented by political and religious leaders; deliberate but informal inventions by literary and artistic elites which led through myth creation to invention; images formed by the elite which were incorporated as fact into people's reminiscences and rediscovered and universalized; and, finally, ideas in the air for generations given form and substance by great men who invented grand metaphors for the nation.

What is the Canon of English Drama, 1660-1737?

IN A RECENT ARTICLE, Robert Weimann summarizes the enormous impact of poststructuralist criticism on studies. As we all know, centrality was (or even is) traditionally defined in terms of representing the genius and universality of human nature and experience. Post-structuralist critics have challenged the entire tradition of English literature by denying the self-evident and permanent grounds for canonization. Instead, we have been forced to recognize the ways in which powerful interests in society have always appropriated for their own cultural agenda. The bard is just another producer of texts implicated by the history of ideological practice. Shakespeare is in ideology(ies) at least as much as ideology is in Shakespeare. Since Shakespeare's plays have no meanings, only uses, and truth in them is conceived, not perceived, they must be resisted along with their author and the canon which places him at its centre. Weimann's conclusion, no longer as shocking as it was when he wrote it just a few years ago, formulates the new critical orthodoxy: What, I think, validly emerges from the new critical practice is the inscription of a cultural situation in which 'meaning' in Shakespearean drama can no longer be read in terms of the privileged representativity of an academic or artistic elite or as something simply given by some unquestioned intellectual authority or consensus in interpretation.' This conclusion should no doubt apply equally well to post-Restoration drama,

Entertainment Video and the Process of Islamization in Pakistan

IntroductionIslamization may best be viewed as a macrolevel and a multidimensionalprocess of the sociocultural transformation of a society. For its success andsustenance, this process has to occur in the form of an ever-evolvingsociocultural movement in synchrony and in symbiosis with other institutional,politicoeconomic, and sociocultural apparatuses of a society. It therefore isour conviction that a program of Islamization begun at the top levels ofgovernment and implemented by way of legalistic pronouncements orinformational implosion and/or explosion is unlikely to succeed unless itbecomes a self-propulsive pervasive force located in that particular society’sculture industry. Without this symbiosis, it is unlikely that the objectivesof Islamization will ever reach the grass-roots level of that society, adevelopment which would almost certainly preclude its concretization intoa collective but accretive “social cognition,” “social affect,” and “social conation.”As a result, the apparently contra-Islamic socialization potential of the modemculture industry, particularly the fare on entertainment video in Muslimcountries in general and in Pakistan in particular, will continue to undermineand exert a major pull away from the objectives of any serious strategy forthe Islamization of a society.In the relevant literature, a society’s culture industry refers not only toall of its various transmitter categories of intellectual and artistic elites andprofessionals (i.e., educators, journalists, and writers) but also to its mediainstitutions which purvey mass culture through entertainment fare. Thepresent paper, in line with the culturalist approach to media theory, thereforebroadly conceptualizes the mass media of communication in terms of cultureindustry. It is predicated on the assumption that, among others, entertainmentvideo, by which is meant dramatized entertainment, films, and all otherdramatized and fictionalized fare through such video-media as TV, VCR,and cinema, should be and can be harnessed to strengthen, disseminate,promote, and cultivate the Islamic foundations of our culture. The theoreticalumbrella and the empirical evidence already exist in the video-media effects,particularly in the case of television, the tradition of mass communicationresearch. These can be garnered to project, test, and pursue the entertainmentvideo policy directions of what may be called the Islamic enculturation ofPakistani society. While this objective may not be successfully accomplishedoutside of a holistic framework of a total communication policy- a themeI have touched on elsewhere - some realization of entertainment video’s impactpotential is possible. Moreover, this realization can theoretically sensitizeus to those of its possible cultural functions and dysfunctions which mightfrontally impinge upon the Pakistani government’s Islamization efforts ...

Women Dancing: The Structure of Gender in Yeats's Early Plays for Dancers

Yeats's plays for dancers were, in part, a response to the failure of his version of national literature to establish, conceptually as well as practically, a popular context for his work. He wrote, in 1919, that the Abbey was not the kind of theatre he had wished to create, "and its success has been to me a discouragement and a defeat." In "The Theatre," Yeats gave up the earlier ideal of an elite art that is also "the Art of the people," and accepted the necessity for two theatres, the Popular Theatre, and his own, "unpopular theatre" meant for a small audience in a small room and for which "there are my Four Plays jor Dancers as a beginning." Yeats's adaptation of Noh drama, his decision to call plays based on that form plays for dancers, the placing of a dance at the climax of the play, "instead of the disordered passion of nature" — these came at a time of retreat from a public theatre after the failure of his conception of the relationship between politics and art to set the agenda for the theatre in Ireland.

The uses of popular culture by rival elites: The case of alsace, 1890–1914

In the final years of the nineteenth century, the artistic and intellectual elite of the former French province of Alsace became the chief supporters and creators of popular culture. Buoyed by patronage from the urban middle classes in such cities as Strasbourg and Colmar, the so-called ‘Alsatian Awakening’ movement succeeded between 1890 and 1914 in founding journals, museums devoted to folk arts, and theaters where contemporary plays written in Alsatian dialect were performed.’ The artists’ deliberate attempt to lay claim to popular culture as their own arose as a response to similar claims from Germany. In effect, two elites-one Alsatian, the other composed of German settlers and administrators who had immigrated following the forced annexation of Alsace in I871confronted one another over the the issue of interpreting and preserving Alsatian popular culture. By the eve of World War I, the Germans had virtually conceded defeat, while a native Alsatian intellectual elite had fashioned an image of Alsatian identity which endures substantially unaltered to this day. The significance of this brief episode in the cultural history of Alsace lies in the light that it sheds on the relations between elite and popular culture, as well as on the conditions for survival of popular culture in the modern era. (By ‘elite’ I mean here those-both German and Alsatian-possessing political or economic power, or those whose formal education or artistic training set them apart from a less educated public. With the exception of a few German aristocrats, they were predominantly middle-class; virtually all came from urban backgrounds. By ‘popular’ I mean those lacking that power or training, of peasant or workingclass origins, whether from the city or the countryside.) Why should the rivalry between two elites be played out in the arena of popular culture? Further, what does this contest suggest about elite and popular culture as definitional categories? Elite and popular cultures are commonly viewed as mutually exclusive-what belongs to one, by definition, cannot belong to the other. Yet here we find the boundaries blurred. In 1978 there appeared two influential books that largely set the terms for the discussion of popular culture in the ensuing decade. Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe and Robert Muchembled’s Culture pupuluire e? culture des Sites both chronicled the decline of a once-vigorous popular culture. Both agreed that the relations between elite and popular culture in Europe had passed through three distinct stages since the Middle Ages. In the first, ‘participatory’ stage, Burke wrote, ‘the elite participated in the little tradition [of popular culture], but the common people did not participate in the great

Lord I'm Coming Home: Everyday Aesthetics in Tidewater North Carolina

Lord I'm Coming Home focuses on a small, white, rural fishing community on the southern reaches of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina. By means of a new kind of anthropological fieldwork, John Forrest seeks to document the entire aesthetic experience of a group of people, showing the aesthetic to be an everyday experience and not some rarefied and pure behavior reserved for an artistic elite. The opening chapter of the book is a vivid fictional narrative of a typical day in Tidewater, presented from the perspective of one fisherman. In the following two chapters the author sets forth the philosophical and anthropological foundations of his book, paying particular attention to problems of defining aesthetic, to methodological concerns, and to the natural landscape of his field site. Reviewing his own experience as both participant and observer, he then describes in scrupulous detail the aesthetic forms in four areas of Tidewater life: work, church, and leisure. People use these forms, Forrest shows, to establish personal and group identities, facilitate certain kinds of interactions while inhibiting others, and cue appropriate behavior. His concluding chapter deals with the different life cycles of men and women, insider-outsider relations, secular and sacred domains, the image and metaphor of home, and the essential role that aesthetics plays in these spheres. The first ethnography to evoke the full aesthetic life of a community, Lord I'm Coming Home will be important reading not only for anthropologists but also for scholars and students in the fields of American studies, art, folklore, and sociology.

The democratic elite: America's movie stars

This study presents a collective portrait of movie stars, an American artistic elite. It examines the social backgrounds and recruitment patterns of top movie stars in the United States from 1932 to 1984.