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.