In the last lecture of the Commerce and Culture podcast, Paul Cantor defends each new media of art as the next form of high culture.
Culture as Pop Culture
- New media started out as gimmicks like the motion picture
- People got excited and paid a nickel just to see something simple like a train moving or a person waving
- Video games are no exception
- Cantor cites past historical gimmicks that later became high culture like Shakespeare and Victorian novels
- Critics during those times looked down on commercialism because it all appeared the same to them
- A lesson to learn from cultural critics: Don’t write it off until you’ve tried it
- Critics can’t see life beyond a generation
- Reaction to new media forms is “uncannily uniform throughout history” according to Cantor
- Every time new media is on the market it’s the same negative reaction
- Critics react with, “Contains too much sex and violence, we must ban it” or “Our youth are addicted to it and it’s destroying their lives”
- People confuse illusion with reality
- Addiction
- E.g. Homer’s tragedies
- Plato complains about too much sex and violence and how people confuse it with reality
- Tragedies were a new medium
- Aristotle comes up with the catharsis theory in response to Plato
- Plato complains that tragedies makes people lustful and angry
- Aristotle said tragedies arouses passions for the purpose of purging them in a safe manner
- It was a safe outlet for people to experience these emotions
- Shakspeare plays, Victorian novels, comic books, TV, video games all were criticized for the same reasons