If the question turns out to be on the British programme, it will be in the form of an essay - that is to say a fairly open question. Of course, you need to be able to mobilize appropriate examples to illustrate your answer, but you are free to choose what examples you use. So, naturally, the problem is not to be sure you have memorized every artist we have studied, or every musician. To help, here is an example from last year . The question was as follows:
"Write an essay in English.
“The power of products of popular culture
is that they give the people what they want.”
Discuss this quotation, examining what
different thinkers have said concerning the demand for popular culture, and
looking in particular at how visual artists have found a wide audience for
their work.
There are many different ways of answering this question well. It was essential to be able to explain that "what people want" is complicated, because (as Bourdieu said) people's social origins define what they will probably want and even it has been said that (as Adorno alleged) the industry can make people want things). But otherwise, it is a very open question which allows you to show the three qualities mentioned in the first question above. Here is the feedback I put on the blog after this test.
“The power of products of popular culture is that they
give the people what they want.”
Discuss this quotation, examining what different
thinkers have said concerning the demand for popular culture, and looking in particular
at how visual artists have found a wide audience for their work.
« Discuss this quotation ». This
means you must say how far it appears to be true or false, but also what other
similar questions are relevant concerning popular culture.
There are many ways to answer the
question, while showing the knowledge you have acquired about British culture
specifically. Here are some initial notes, which I will add to as I mark your
work.
1)
You
should note that this is a controversial quotation and you should be able to
show that some might tend to agree and some to disagree.
2)
Some
of the terms need dismantling. a) who are « the people » (note the
importance of the definite article: « le peuple » not « les
gens »). Is there a homogeneous « people » in modern society, or
are we divided into « generations » or social classes or
« affective alliances »? b) Is it possible to know « what the
people want »? This is not a simple idea. Why do people want what they
want? Etc.
3)
Which
thinkers can you write about in connection with the quotation? Adorno is
obviously one. Several students summarized quite accurately the introduction to
Adorno’s ideas which I presented in class, but the exercise is not to write a
summary. His ideas must be compared with the quotation. Adorno was generally
opposed to products of popular culture. Far from believing that people (or the
people) were being given what they wanted, he maintained that people were being
told what they should want, were being almost obliged to want what the market wanted
to sell to them. What is more, he believed that people were being given
experiences which were bad for them, which made them into children again and
stopped them from becoming fully human.
4)
Several
other thinkers could be mentioned, but one obvious one is Hebdige and his work
on the meaning of style. He looked at what was provided for young people by
rock and roll, punk or reggae subcultures. He does not exactly say that they
give people what they want, but that they are useful in people’s lives, because
they help to structure (sometimes imaginary) resistance to official capitalist,
elitist views of the world. Jyst to tale one example, the lover of reggae,
living in a world where white bourgeois or nationalistic thought is taught and
valued can with others create a small community where black language and music,
peace loving ideas and back to Africa dreams can be put at the centre of life.
You might also want to mention Grossberg,
and his idea that people use popular culture to build affective alliances, imagined
communities which allow them to deal with the world. This approach again
emphasizes mass participation in popular culture, and does not present popular
culture as simply something produced for passive consumers by a market hoping
to make a profit.
For the second
part on visual art we are still looking at the same question: are people
receiving « what they want », but there is an added complication :
visual art is not necessarily popular culture. Artists are often trained at
elite institutions, for example. This is not always the case: one might term
street art as popular culture: anyone can do it, and people can become well
known without the intervention of established museums and galleries (often with
a little help from the internet), in the way that
pop stars might.
Banksy is the obvious example, producing accessible, thought provoking work
available to everyone, even those who do not feel art galleries are for them.
Other artists such as L. S. Lowry have become tremendously popular ( he even
has a pop song about him). Photographers such as Martin Parr also seem to be
trying to make their work accessible,
and land artists such as Goldsworthy take their work out of the galleries and
out of the towns. [each time you mention, an artist, it is good to give one
example of their work, which I am not doing here]. Public sculpture projects
such as the fourth plinth are also placed in contexts which make them open to
everyone.
On the
other hand, a lot of visual art remains reserved to the initiated. Recent winners
of the prestigious Turner prize cannot be said to be producing art for
everyone.
The question of publicly funded art
galleries is linked to the idea of giving people what they want. The fact that
galleries are free in the UK, are no longer concentrated only in London, and
receive millions of visitors, are vectors of popularity, yet the dynamic is
mostly top-down, and the galleries do not correspond to most criteria of
popular culture.
HEDGING
Because
popular culture is ever changing and extremely heterogeneous, it is very
difficult to make strong affirmative statements about it. This means you need
to know how to hedge, and this more difficult in a foreign language.
For
example, it is better not to say “popular culture is just to entertain people
and have fun”. You should say one of the following:
"Many
commentators feel that popular culture is only concerned with
entertainment and fun."
"Popular culture may be seen as mainly a
question of entertainment and fun."
And then you can give some counter example
which adds nuance. For example, if pop music is very much concerned with fun,
it seems clear that it can sometimes be aiming at making people think,
expressing political demands or denouncing injustice.
This was in fact the classroom test - the principle for the final exam is exactly the same, but it is longer. For the classroom test above, two thirds of students got a mark of ten or over.
I hope this helps!
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