High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainmen t (Paperback)

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.