"highbrow"

stockhausen was highbrow, and cage was not?

See also "Longhair" which is what highbrow was called before hippies and the other lower classes grew beards.

I shd point out that most of the stuff i like is resolutely middlebrow, and i like middlebrow stuff a lot. however, i kind of like the idea of there being "something up there".

plus, i'd probably enjoy dj ambient flotation tank better than xenakis if i'm honest.

(see also: vice magazine. ha ha.)

The actual -brow notion comes from racial theories of the 19th century BTW.

One lives and learns! I'd just assumed that "highbrow" was like high culture assuming a snooty, holier-than-thou look, and "low" and "middle" was just newspaper writers filling in the gaps so to speak.

I think when the terms came into cultural use there was a much clearer distinction - now they're useless because there's a big load of cultural practise which doesn't seem to 'fit' anywhere in the schema. OK yes opera is high and pop is low, but where does 'art' cinema or Beat poetry or Beefheart go?

Originally the idea of "cool" was that it was a mark of status which transcended things like money and class etc. etc. - see also "soul". The idea that it wasn't something you could buy or otherwise aquire, but something that some people had - perhaps as a reaction towards calcified ideas of status being only attained by money and/or class. Black people, teenagers, the working class - this was where the original notion of "cool" came from.

Which is why it seems diametrically opposed to "highbrow" in that highbrow belongs to high culture, and therefore education and taste being an intellectual form of conspicuous consumption.

The whole problem derives from the merchandisation of "cool". "Cool" becomes something that you can buy or attain - cool becomes associated with a certain lifestyle, so therefore any commodifiable evidence of that lifestyle suddenly becomes marketable, and this formerly anti-class concept just becomes another way of accruing status.

This process started in the 50s and 60s with subtle changes both in society and in advertising techniques. So now, a generation later, our grandparents' generation - the post-war consumer generation - have actually been suckered into the "cool" trap.

"cool" is probably a red herring, and "youth" might be closer to the truth

Scarce and wise: old people knew how to survive long cold winters in Manitoba, but they don't know how to maintain elaborate computer systems that now ensure Manitobians can have heat running throughout the season.

if you stop thinking you die (or turn into a vegetable or something).

highbrow

adj : (informal) highly cultured or educated; "highbrow events such as the ballet or opera"; "a highbrowed literary critic" [syn: highbrowed] n : a person of intellectual or erudite tastes

You rang?

You rang, sir, I mean, dude?

Enquiring minds want to know!

Leonardo da Vinci didn't need no stinkin' brow. Ah, and "Da Vinci" middlebrow, but "Leonardo" upper-middlebrow.

This is a v good question -- who is highbrow *right now*? To get catewgorized thus you have to have been heard of, so not just an old history prof. I would say Hobsbawm is highbrow, Schama mezzo, Starkey low. Come on!!

Yes, but endless World War II "look at the plucky British fighting off the eeeeeevil Nazis!" programs are the lowbrow of documentaries!

I mean, fair enough, I only saw, like, one episode of his last series (I think it was the Richard III episode that got the Richard III Anti-Defamation League so up in arms) and it still suffered from cheesey historical reenactions and all (which is worse? Cheesey historical reenactments or cheesey photomontages of old film footage?).

(I really should start mine own Nigel Spivey thread to keep all this crap from spewing out over other threads.)

Most history programmes on telly are middlebrow, tho, surely: it ranges, of course, from the uppermiddlebrow that is Schama (who may be populist but even on TV his historical arguments are v. subtle and social-historical rather than Great Men Do Great Stuff) to the hideous lowermiddlebrow that was Tristram Hunt with his "let's say the same things about Oliver Cromwell people have been saying for years, which were disproved in, ooh, the nineteen-sixties! because the people don't want history, they want pwetty stories about BAD ROUNDHEADS and GALLANT CAVALIERS!" Yet somehow not even he is quite vulgar enough to be lowbrow.

I'm trying to imagine a highbrow history programme and I have a feeling it would be quite unwatchable, too too dry for words.

(Actually, for some reason, I seem to recall that the series upset Mark S so much that he actually started a thread about it... let me dig...)

history on television

Though it does not mention any Spivey Goodness by name, because no one seems to have known his name before I became, erm, obsessed with him.

(I also don't know why I didn't post to the original thread... possibly because I was on tour, or possibly because I didn't have a television, and only got to see history docus when I went over friends' houses to watch the Plucky Britons Beating The Nazis Channel, I mean, the History Channel.)

John Cage, for instance, is a fantastic communicator, and highbrow.

Bourdieu saw these responses as tied very closely to the educational levels of his respondents. Education provides us with a kind of 'social capital' which can -- but does not necessarily always -- translate into actual capital in terms of better salary and lifestyle. 'Cultural capital' has a metaphorical relationship with money, but Bourdieu points out that whereas money can be earned, invested, accumulated, and spent quite quickly, cultural capital takes a long time to acquire. It is tied to the slow learning cycle of individuals progressing through education and socialisation.

Cultural capital, then, is connected closely to education. But it is also connected to something which Bourdieu calls 'habitus', which is the set of all unconscious, culturally learned habits of a particular people. This might be expressed in terms of hygiene -- people from different places have different ideas of what's clean and what's dirty -- or of cuisine -- the American conception of cheese is of a substance much less smelly that what a Frenchman would call cheese -- or it may be the instinctual assumption about what is the correct distance to stand from a stranger in a public place.

Bourdieu's ideas on 'cultural capital' became very influential, and were developed in the field of subcultural studies by writers like Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thorton. McRobbie wrote in 'The Subcultures Reader' about how the same logic of accumulation of cultural capital exists in subcultures, where, instead of trying to aquire legitimacy by familiarising themselves with 'legitimate' high art forms such as classical music, painting and literature, social actors aquire 'cool' by demonstrating their knowledge of reggae dub plates or showing their stylish taste by the choices they make in thrift stores and the way they recontextualise secondhand clothes. McRobbie, adapting Bourdieu's phrase, called this process the accumulation of 'subcultural capital'.

In her book ‘The Social Logic of Subcultural Capital’ (Routledge, 1997), Sarah Thorton looked at the way youth culture, seen as a 'culture without distinction', in fact contains a plethora of distinctions, each conferring 'cultural capital' on those who have mastered it. We could see examples of this in the connoisseur-like attention to stitching and labels on blue jeans, or the kudos attached to knowledge about Abba songs.

It really makes me want to tie him down and force him to watch the Queen's Christmas Address over and over and over.

And my libido. Possibly permanently. Ick!

::mental images of NStheHH's odd kinky leather strap neck thing::

Ah, that's better.

'The use of these words to distinguish one form of culture from another actually stems from the use of the words "highbrow" and "lowbrow" in the Victorian era (Julia Keller, Culture: the great divide). These words refer to the belief that by measuring a person's forehead, it was possible to find out how intelligent he or she was.'