To this:
A week before Comic-Con, I was at the Shakespeare Festival at the Old Globe. While at Comic-Con, I saw graphic novelist Adrian Tomine , who's literary sensibility is embraced by the New Yorker and who gave a very thoughtful interview recently on NPR's Fresh Air . & I also saw Predator and Batman and Wolverine. & All of this is to say, my cultural experience tends to be one that merges the high and the low on a daily basis. & I always suspected this was true for a lot of people, and that the very lines defining the two were getting blurry. Today in the L.A. Times, reporter Scott Timberg writes a great article on this very phenomenon. & He surveys his circle of friends and colleagues and learns that New Yorker music critic Alex Ross likes popcorn movies. & Writer Pico Iyer loved Nacho Libre so much he saw it twice.
Timberg also looks at how different forms of media have contributed to or imploded cultural hierarchies. & For example, the rise of the television as a common form of entertainment meant that books and literature became high art. & Reading became a morally virtuous exercise for the intellectual elite, while television rotted the brains of the masses, so the thinking went. & On the other hand, the Internet has challenged high art as an elite exercise and made it accessible. & Everyone with a computer can now watch video footage of symphonies and opera companies. & And, contemporary musicians are taking classical compositions and sampling them in their own music. &
This seems like an appropriate discussion to have on the heels of Comic-Con, a convention that celebrates and promotes the popular arts. & Is there a qualitative difference between a Bach concerto and a new HBO drama from Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) about vampires? & Are both art? & Should one be held in more esteem than the other? & These are, of course, timeless questions about aesthetics and society but they never cease to be interesting questions.
