Post by Willow on Jan 19, 2013 7:31:41 GMT 9.5
WHO occupies the public spaces in your mind? Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Ricky Ponting, Hugh Jackman, Kylie Minogue, Bert Newton? It's almost certain that there's no one there from high culture. And that's a bit of a change.
When John Douglas Pringle wrote his classic Australian Accent back in the 1950s, he included an entire chapter on Australian poets. This is remarkable because Pringle was aiming for a large, mainstream audience. A similar book now might include a chapter on Australian filmmakers, which raises the question: Are films high culture? But no general book today aimed at the educated layman would include a survey of Australian poets.
We all have plenty of private spaces in our mind where friends and family, personal memories and pet ideas reside and sometimes jostle each other. Then we have special-interest or niche files of the brain. Perhaps you are a stamp collector or a Marvel comics fan, or an aficionado of church bells, Facebook pages or contemporary jazz. These niche files are the mind's semi-public spaces. Quite a lot of people share them, but these are still relatively small minorities.
The public spaces of the mind, in the Australian context, concern those people and ideas that are thought about, fairly regularly, by the majority of Australians, or at least by a minority near to half. And they have been shrinking. That's a commonplace observation. The astonishing proliferation of information technology, combined with rising levels of affluence, have had an atomising effect on culture of all kinds. We now pursue our specialities.
Except for cricket and some current affairs shows on the ABC, I almost never watch free-to-air television now. I watch the things that interest me - movies, current affairs, sport and real estate programs on channels dedicated to them. When I was a kid there were just three commercial stations, and the ABC. If there was a popular movie on a Sunday night, half the kids in the playground on Monday had watched it. That kind of mental ubiquity is now rare. It is true that an amateur YouTube clip can go viral and achieve a million viewings in a day or two, but it will be forgotten just as quickly.
My concern here is narrower than all that. Where is high culture now in the public spaces of our mind? It may be that as many or more people enjoy opera today as ever did in the past. But Nellie Melba and Joan Sutherland have no successors in terms of their place in the Australian public mind.
When I was at school in the 1970s, Patrick White was discussed by everybody, even if not read by everybody. There is no Australian literary novelist of whom we could make that claim today.
There is a difficult definitional blurring between high culture and some forms of popular culture. Film, and to a lesser extent TV, have taken over many of the main tasks the novel performed in the past. Nonetheless, intellectually and culturally, books offer more than films and an individual or society that loses the taste for serious books loses something very precious indeed.
But of course a lot of people still read serious books. They just don't read the same serious books as other people do. They tend to read mainly within their distinct fields of interest. Very few books now occupy a public space in our minds, as did once, say, Geoffrey Blainey's The Tyranny of Distance.
So it is fair to say that high culture has retreated from the public spaces of our minds to the private spaces. Does this matter? I think it does. Though no panacea for any social ills, high culture has both a civilising and an elevating quality. It is the most sophisticated, and most profound, creative activity that human beings can engage in.
A human mind that has never met Shakespeare or the King James Bible is impoverished, whereas a human mind that, culturally, has met not much more than these two, such as Abraham Lincoln's, is capable of comprehending and embracing the entire human condition. Contemporary culture lays such stress on novelty that it loses sight of the enduring quality of high culture, even the value of endurance. The retreat of high culture from the public space to the private is a serious loss and one we may yet regret more than we imagine.
When John Douglas Pringle wrote his classic Australian Accent back in the 1950s, he included an entire chapter on Australian poets. This is remarkable because Pringle was aiming for a large, mainstream audience. A similar book now might include a chapter on Australian filmmakers, which raises the question: Are films high culture? But no general book today aimed at the educated layman would include a survey of Australian poets.
We all have plenty of private spaces in our mind where friends and family, personal memories and pet ideas reside and sometimes jostle each other. Then we have special-interest or niche files of the brain. Perhaps you are a stamp collector or a Marvel comics fan, or an aficionado of church bells, Facebook pages or contemporary jazz. These niche files are the mind's semi-public spaces. Quite a lot of people share them, but these are still relatively small minorities.
The public spaces of the mind, in the Australian context, concern those people and ideas that are thought about, fairly regularly, by the majority of Australians, or at least by a minority near to half. And they have been shrinking. That's a commonplace observation. The astonishing proliferation of information technology, combined with rising levels of affluence, have had an atomising effect on culture of all kinds. We now pursue our specialities.
Except for cricket and some current affairs shows on the ABC, I almost never watch free-to-air television now. I watch the things that interest me - movies, current affairs, sport and real estate programs on channels dedicated to them. When I was a kid there were just three commercial stations, and the ABC. If there was a popular movie on a Sunday night, half the kids in the playground on Monday had watched it. That kind of mental ubiquity is now rare. It is true that an amateur YouTube clip can go viral and achieve a million viewings in a day or two, but it will be forgotten just as quickly.
My concern here is narrower than all that. Where is high culture now in the public spaces of our mind? It may be that as many or more people enjoy opera today as ever did in the past. But Nellie Melba and Joan Sutherland have no successors in terms of their place in the Australian public mind.
When I was at school in the 1970s, Patrick White was discussed by everybody, even if not read by everybody. There is no Australian literary novelist of whom we could make that claim today.
There is a difficult definitional blurring between high culture and some forms of popular culture. Film, and to a lesser extent TV, have taken over many of the main tasks the novel performed in the past. Nonetheless, intellectually and culturally, books offer more than films and an individual or society that loses the taste for serious books loses something very precious indeed.
But of course a lot of people still read serious books. They just don't read the same serious books as other people do. They tend to read mainly within their distinct fields of interest. Very few books now occupy a public space in our minds, as did once, say, Geoffrey Blainey's The Tyranny of Distance.
So it is fair to say that high culture has retreated from the public spaces of our minds to the private spaces. Does this matter? I think it does. Though no panacea for any social ills, high culture has both a civilising and an elevating quality. It is the most sophisticated, and most profound, creative activity that human beings can engage in.
A human mind that has never met Shakespeare or the King James Bible is impoverished, whereas a human mind that, culturally, has met not much more than these two, such as Abraham Lincoln's, is capable of comprehending and embracing the entire human condition. Contemporary culture lays such stress on novelty that it loses sight of the enduring quality of high culture, even the value of endurance. The retreat of high culture from the public space to the private is a serious loss and one we may yet regret more than we imagine.