As far as I can tell, the phenomenon you’re noticing is simply that mass culture is not a process that optimizes for artistic value. But why should anyone have expected it to be?
I just can’t figure out what ‘mass culture’, ‘elite culture’ and ‘artistic value’ are supposed to mean in your argument. Taking music as an example, AFAICT, the main way in which our current ‘mass culture’ music differs ‘artistically’ from the ‘elite music’ of centuries past is that the latter was a literate genre, relying on the written medium of ‘sheet music’ in contrast to audio records. It’s also true that music being distributed in recorded form implies a very different mode of consumption; music is no longer seen these days as something that the average person might want to actively engage with, in stark contrast to the past.
But even these facts do not seem to fully justify a conflation of “elite” status with “artistic value”. For one thing, surely a lot of the “elite” music we now choose to value was consumed passively, e.g. in opera houses or as inoffensive background music to elite social gatherings (the latter spawning the entire subgenre of “chamber music”!), whereas the earliest forms of “mass music” (which in fact were first available in notated form, in contrast to later audio records) would be engaged with actively, mainly through amateur performance by middle- and sometimes lower-class folks. More generally, it often happens that we choose to value “elite” things of the past more, simply because they were associated with a social elite, even though these niche practices aren’t actually very significant historically; and some of this seems to be going on here.
I just can’t figure out what ‘mass culture’, ‘elite culture’ and ‘artistic value’ are supposed to mean in your argument.
I don’t believe you, at least with respect to the first two (I’ll grant that “artistic value” is harder to pin down, and I didn’t make any attempt). Rather, I think you’re (perhaps reflexively) attempting to enforce norms of discourse that are designed to prevent certain kinds of thoughts from being thought, or at least stated. Because I, on the contrary, think it’s important for those thoughts to be heard, I’m consciously rebelling against those norms, which is why the style of my comments now is different from what it was in the past.
I just can’t figure out what ‘mass culture’, ‘elite culture’ and ‘artistic value’ are supposed to mean in your argument. Taking music as an example, AFAICT, the main way in which our current ‘mass culture’ music differs ‘artistically’ from the ‘elite music’ of centuries past is that the latter was a literate genre, relying on the written medium of ‘sheet music’ in contrast to audio records. It’s also true that music being distributed in recorded form implies a very different mode of consumption; music is no longer seen these days as something that the average person might want to actively engage with, in stark contrast to the past.
But even these facts do not seem to fully justify a conflation of “elite” status with “artistic value”. For one thing, surely a lot of the “elite” music we now choose to value was consumed passively, e.g. in opera houses or as inoffensive background music to elite social gatherings (the latter spawning the entire subgenre of “chamber music”!), whereas the earliest forms of “mass music” (which in fact were first available in notated form, in contrast to later audio records) would be engaged with actively, mainly through amateur performance by middle- and sometimes lower-class folks. More generally, it often happens that we choose to value “elite” things of the past more, simply because they were associated with a social elite, even though these niche practices aren’t actually very significant historically; and some of this seems to be going on here.
I don’t believe you, at least with respect to the first two (I’ll grant that “artistic value” is harder to pin down, and I didn’t make any attempt). Rather, I think you’re (perhaps reflexively) attempting to enforce norms of discourse that are designed to prevent certain kinds of thoughts from being thought, or at least stated. Because I, on the contrary, think it’s important for those thoughts to be heard, I’m consciously rebelling against those norms, which is why the style of my comments now is different from what it was in the past.