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Andreas Huyssen

Andreas Huyssen. After the Great Divide. Structure of lecture. What is the great divide? Modernism - a historical background After the divide - postmodernism? Examples. Definition.

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Andreas Huyssen

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  1. Andreas Huyssen After the Great Divide

  2. Structure of lecture • What is the great divide? • Modernism - a historical background • After the divide - postmodernism? • Examples

  3. Definition • The Great Divide is the kind of discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture” (Huyssen: viii).

  4. The distinction implies: • A divide between types of media: old ones are superior to the new ones! • A divide between aesthetic and cultural value; elite culture superior to popular culture! • A divide in moral; elite culture promotes good norms and values, popular or mass culture promotes bad, the are immoral! • A divide in appeal; elite culture is for the individual and unique, popular culture is for the masses!

  5. Braque vs. superman

  6. Webern vs. Crosby

  7. Modernism • Rise of a high culture from 1850 • Defined through exclusion of mass culture • Autonomy of art (separating art from reality) • Abstract painting, atonal music, rationalism in design

  8. The historical avant-garde • Attacks the bourgeois institution of art • Reunite art and reality • shock techniques • Duchamps L.H.O.O.Q • elle a chaud au cul” (”she has a hot ass”)

  9. A mixture and a nivellization of cultural hierarchies • A loss of tradition, meaning and reference. • Liberation from established cultural hierarchies f.ex. through subversive humor • Two tendencies: • Popular culture include elements from high culture (modernism) • High (elite) culture borrowing from popular culture.

  10. Historical trends after WW2 • Polarization replaced by optimism • Education society • Alternative cultures • Not so much an establishment of new canons / hierarchies as a fundamental challenge and questioning of cultural hierarchies as such.

  11. Mapping the postmodern • Pomo is neither a continuation of modernism, nor a radical split. • Criticism of modernism: • Modernism has become a dogma, an affirmative culture • Privilege to the rational and self-reflecting. • Excludes the female

  12. Modernism • Unité d' habitation in Marseille, 1947-52 • Le Corbusier

  13. Pomo • NBC Tower at Cityfront Center (1989)

  14. Pop art • Fascination for popular culture as most fundamental characteristic • Elite cultural (art galleries), but included a lot of conventions, styles and icons of popular culture. • Combines art and reality (commercial culture)

  15. Pop art as critique • How can Warhol’s art be a critique of society? • It became a symbol of opposition in Europe • frees critical tradition from Adornos / modernist insistence on critique as a negation • Emphasizing the mechanism of the culture industry use, but in a discrete manner: through serialization, repetition, simplification. • Tries to integrate art and life (reality) through celebration of the sensual, common and popular.

  16. The breakdown of the great divide • The breakdown is permanent • Huyssen a postmodernist, but not in an “anything goes” way • He remains in a critical tradition • ”Affirmation or critique – that is the question”.

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