The Value of Commercial Arts and Culture: A comparative mixed-methods approach to the reception of popular culture

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project explores the cultural and aesthetic value of commercial culture and arts, focusing on six main areas of contemporary popular culture: film, television, popular music, video gaming, popular literature and comedy. Aesthetic and cultural value are of great importance. In our daily live we constantly make decisions about which forms of culture, art and entertainment we engage with; what texts, works and genres we enjoy, and which ones we value. The vast majority of these are commercial produced. Scholars of many disciplines across arts and humanities, in turn, are tasked to assess the relative worth of different works and objects of art and culture.Yet, methods to evaluate, let alone quantify, cultural value have remained highly controversial, often either focusing solely on process of the production of arts and culture (artists, authors and industries) or conversely only studying uses of popular culture and arts by users alone. There are no objective criteria by which we can determine the aesthetic value of a given object, work or genre - and, as some sociological research has demonstrated, the cultural hierarchies that underpin many of our experiences of popular culture and arts reflect and sometimes legitimise existing hierarchies and inequalities in society.This project therefore seeks to understand aesthetic value not as something that is bound up with a given work of art or text, but that is located in the interaction between culture/art and recipient. Drawing on the notion of 'horizon of experience' the project explores to what extent texts and works in the six different fields of commercial popular culture studied in this project challenge audiences' previous experiences, preferences and expectations and facilities a 'horizontal change' that enriches and broadens previous experiences. This study of intrinsic cultural value in the reception of popular commercial art and culture is supplement by the study of extrinsic social value: the degree to which users, enthusiast and fans experience film, television, popular music, video gaming, popular literature and comedy as pleasurable and enjoyable, becoming an affective part of our identities, and contributing to our wider engagement with culture, arts and society. We do so by employing two different methods from social science research: firstly, based on the analysis of past surveys, we will design and conduct a survey across the main fields of commercial popular culture and arts. This survey will reveal a number of characteristics about the audiences for different fields and genres in commercial arts and culture, including their age, sex and occupation, their values, cultural preferences, consumption patterns, and media usage. Secondly, on the basis of different groups identified in the survey we will select a total of 24 participants, four each from the fields of film, television, popular music, video gaming, popular literature and comedy, for in-depth follow-up interviews in which we explore the history of interviewees' enthusiasm and engagements, and the role that particular fields of popular commercial culture music plays in their everyday life and their sense of identity. Using both methods in parallel will allow us to achieve the following aims:- To identify how and under what circumstances commercial culture and arts enriches and broadens the experiences of users and readers.- To reveal significant variations in the degrees that different fields of commercial culture and arts enrich and broaden the experiences of users and readers.- To explore and document how commercial culture and value become important sources of enjoyment, well-being, belonging and wider participation in cultural life. - To develop and assess research strategies that successfully use a combination of surveying and interviewing methods which are particularly suited to cultural value in commercial arts and culture.