Pop Culture

I watched part of a debate on TV entitled 'Popular Culture: we've seen the future and its junk' and of course the affirmative side trotted out the usual predictable elitist clap trap that I'm so use to hearing applied to Sci-Fi this time applied to all of modern 'pop culture'. It seems if you put the suffix pop in front of culture, suddenly it's not art, it has no actual cultural value... because it's popular. Huh? What's the purpose of culture, any form of culture, if not to engage the public, to express an artists feelings and emotions in such a way as to convey it to the people? Is there any point whatsoever in having the greatest, best written piece of fiction ever, if it's so tedious that only three people in the world have the patience to read it? The negative side pointed out, quite interestingly I thought, that Shakespeare, Mozart and all the greats were, like it or not, among the modern pop culturists (to invent a word) of their own time. Past pop culture has the advantage from our perspective of hindsight. We can 'cherry pick' to quote one of the debaters from the best that each period had to offer and hold them up as shining beacons of culture and respectability. What the elitists conveniently tend to forget is all the rubbish that was around in the time of Shakespeare and friends, they were the exception of their times, not the rule.

Modern culture has no lesser value than that which has gone before, to believe otherwise is to buy into a form of ancestor worship that frankly holds no basis in fact. It's my belief that humans are gradually evolving into smarter beings, not that we're regressing into more primitive. The amount of rubbish around in pop-culture can blind those who choose not to look for the gold in the pile, but there is gold in there. The onus is on us to find it for ourselves and to reject the rubbish for what it is. No-one will know or care who the Big Brother winner of 2008 was in ten or fifty years time, (or even now for that matter) but the work of a great artist, in whatever medium he or she may use, will shine forth from this period and last, just as it's always done and will always do in the future. One thing can be said for the icons of culture gone by, they stood out from what was a much smaller pool of artists.

With mass media we're exposed to a constant stream of widely varied culture both in nature and quality. For one artist to shine in the same way as those of the past I think is extremely unlikely no matter how talented they may be, there's just too many other good ones now too, as well as all the usual rubbish. I can think of countless gifted artists from recent times without whom my life would be less than it is and has been. Asimov, Clarke, Clint Eastwood, Ron Howard, Patrick Stewart, Robert Wise, Tolkien, Paul McCartney join in whenever you feel like it... the list of outstanding artists in their fields from recent times is a whole lot longer than that of those from bygone times. Great art, great literature has a long way to go yet

On the subject of art, literature and creation... not a sausage. Nothing new on any of my stories today. I'm going around in circles with the book, belt wars feels like a dead end right now. I've got a late era space opera kind of thing ticking away in the back of my mind too, but can't think how to start it without stealing from belt wars. I do not want to start down the path of mixing my FTL universe with my Belt Wars system. They're discrete entities with distinctly different physics and social dynamics. We shall see, I'm sure it's just a temporary stoppage.