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The art cannot stand alone, but the relevant part is the audiences and what they make of the art, the fan subculture(s) and what they build on top of it - in co
by PeterisP 3y ago
The art cannot stand alone, but the relevant part is the audiences and what they make of the art, the fan subculture(s) and what they build on top of it - in contrast with that, the corporations which made them are far less relevant.
- calf 3y agoYou're just letting "relevant" do the heavy lifting of your rationale. It's a poor argument. What the audiences make of the art is contingent on the social mores and cultural attitudes of the time - which depend on the socio-political-economic material forces that operate on cultural strata. This is why concepts like commodity fetishism, corporate ideology, and so forth become critical in studying pop cultural phenomena. If you take such a class and don't learn that it is a social studies course in disguise, then you've learned nothing. It's not just merely scholarship about aesthetics and whatever the audience thinks. So the risk here is that these classes are taught wrong. These courses ought to be even more difficult than STEM classes because they require sociology, political and economic theory, philosophy, and so forth, involving open-ended issues and problems about human society. But for some reason (another can of worms) cultural studies is perceived as an "easy" program for academically weaker students to pursue.