Can we come up with a nice word for elitism/snobbishness/avant garde/etc.?

specialist technique and understanding inevitably involves willed ignorance as well as willed learning

So the question I'm asking is if you're so against "the masses", why accept it as a category? Why not just take any given opinion, cultural product, or artwork as you find it and stop playing into the hands of people who want to mass-market or niche-market things to you? That way you get to select 'the best' without having to be elitist or populist or anything. Unless of course you're willing to admit that the construct "the masses" is as useful to your self-identity as it is to your presumed opponents' commercial strategies?

(for example)

that would be nice, but in fact the word elite does not connotate imply self-proclaimed, it is just a common association.

You start off saying "What's wrong with being the best?" - 'elite' here meaning people who are 'the best', presumably at something they do. I might be an elite internet analyst, for instance (though I'm not). But your next example is of someone who consumes 'the best'. A lot of the history of 'elitism' in Western culture hinges on this shift from it being a qualitative measuring system (backed up by power structures) to it being a kind of sympathetic magic whereby one becomes part of the elite through ones consumption patterns, like tribesmen eating their elders' brains to gain their wisdom.

I agree mark, I was being kind of specific in my original question (film snob v. snob in general). I mean what you are desribing as arrogance, the perfect recent example of it would be A New Kind Of Science by Steven Wolfram. Have we talked about this on ILE? not that I would spend the time to read it. In this case, judging form the excerpts, I have to go with the masses.

Listen, this thread was not really meant as a troll (ok, maybe the last sentence) - especially in the USA, there is a definite and widespread reaction against intellectualism.

You then get a group of people who need to be wooed, i.e. marketed to, and hence "mass appeal" appears as a concept. But the incredibly useful thing about it as a concept is that it creates its opposite, the mutation of "taste" from an exotic salon game where one measured oneself against other aesthetes to something where a second, "non-mass" category could be created and appealed to, where one starts defining oneself against "the mass" (and votes or consumes accordingly).

Anyway, gotta go - I have film festival tickets for a selection of short pieces... (No, really!)

but what else can you do about the masses?

In market research we have a concept called "outliers" which translates as those people whose opinions/behaviour is too extreme to fit whatever model we're building, so often their data gets discarded from the survey. G's use of the "avant garde" posits it as the outliers of mass culture, ignored by the corporate world because it doesn't fit their model. This isn't too far from a truth but it still allows the a-g to be defined by "the masses" not by any kind of positive qualities it might possess. Outliers aren't outliers because their opinions are right, just too different to fit. And G suggests it's not a qualitative judgement - but then what good is it?

I agree about the anti-intellectualism thing. It's not what you read/watch/see/visit; it's what happens in your head after you've done that, and that gets forgotten.

Mod: +2 insightful (or whatever that Custos thang is that gets you so annoyed)

Outlier than thou, anyway.

Death to normals!

That said, I do like the Velvet Underground indie aesthetic of artists setting their face against what's popular and plowing their own oppositionalist furrow.

I do think it's great that Tom is incorporating insights from marketing into ILX. Maybe he could put a few pictures of classy birds into Freaky Trigger to up readership figures.

Tom, one thing i have been thinking about in relation to your posts is that i probably said that I was "frustrated" with the masses because of the very fact that they do not in fact exist except in the marketing sense. Still useful concept for me in that if something is clearly popular in the mainstream it is a signal to me that I might not find it that interesting. Not really a qualitative judgement because (if yr. cynical, 95% of everything is crap, whether pop or not). I think the "masses" in fact do a good job of selecting the best of what of what appeals to them it. Obviously quite a lot of stuff that is purely aimed at popular appeal but lacking in quality is rejected. Not always, but often. I guess I was also feeling frustrated because like I said above people are a often stupidly reactionary against intellectualism etc. This is a peculiarly American phenomenon in large part i think.

there's a certain irony in the left freaking out over Citizen's United when the real takeaway from this election is that it's idiots with $20 that are the much bigger problem in presidential elections

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, August 3, 2016 4:15 PM

SHAKEYISM

you're the perfect Modern Democrat.

oh you