High–Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment

One of the most significant developments in the popular culture of the past decade has been the popularization of elite tastes for mass audiences. Blockbuster museum shows, high–concept literary adaptations, widespread interest in interior design, and superstar opera singers all suggest that the relationship between "high art" and popular culture is undergoing a profound transformation. But what does this marriage of "good taste" and popular culture really mean?

High–Pop is a collection of newly commissioned essays that explores this cultural formation across disciplines and media from film, television, and interior design/material culture to publishing, music, and museum exhibition. Drawing on contemporary instances of a global phenomenon, nine leading thinkers explore a number of important issues central to cultural criticism: the increasingly unsettled relationship between the public and private spheres; the blurring distinction between consumer culture and aesthetic value; the impact of high–pop on our cultural identity; and the nature and the future of popular culture itself.

An edited collection with a genuinely polemical agenda, High–Pop does nothing less than issue a challenge to the project of cultural studies to focus on all but ignored forms of mainstream culture.

List of Illustrations.

List of Contributors.

Acknowledgments.

High–Pop: An Introduction: Jim Collins (University of Notre Dame).

1. "Expecting Rain": Opera as Popular Culture? John Storey (Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland).

2. Signature and Brand: John Frow (University of Edinburgh).

3. From Brahmin Julia to Working–Class Emeril: The Evolution of Television Cooking: Toby Miller (Tisch School of Fine Arts, NYU).

4. "Tan"talizing Others: Multicultural Anxiety and the New Orientalism: Kim Middleton Meyer (University of Notre Dame, Doctoral Candidate).

5. Class Rites in the Age of the Blockbuster: Alan Wallach (College of William and Mary).

6. Museums and Department Stores: Close Encounters: Carol Duncan (Ramapo College).

7. Which Shakespeare to Love? Film, Fidelity, and the Performance of Literature: Tim Corrigan (Temple University).

8. No (Popular) Place Like Home? Jim Collins (University of Notre Dame).

9. Style and the Perfection of Things: Celia Lury (Goldsmiths College, University of London).

Index.

Jim Collins is Associate Professor of Film, Television, and English at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Postmodernism (1989) and Architectures of Excess (1995), and co–editor of Film Theory Goes to the Movies (1993).

" High–Pop is an important book, and a challenging one. Its wide–ranging examination of the integration of high culture into popular entertainment offers rich and provocative insights into the changing dynamics of taste, value, culture, and consumption. Just the kind of critical rethinking of earlier perspectives that cultural studies now badly needs." Tony Bennett, the Open University