MASS CULTURE: TEMPTATION BY THE ADAPTED “TRANSLATION” FROM AN ELITE LANGUAGE OR CONQUERING NEW HEIGHTS?

Abstract

Dear readers! The editorsof «Индустрии впечатлений. Технологии социокультурных исследований / Experience industries. Socio-Cultural Research Technologies» (EISCRT) present to your attention the second issue of our publication this year. The articles of Russian researchers published in it are focused on the topical moments of the interdisciplinary modern mass culture, which our esteemed authors this time made the main object of their scientific research. While the subject field is narrowed down to the study of traditions and innovations in contemporary art, which is, in a certain sense, the quintessence of all human culture. The traditional dichotomy of high and low in this context is transformed to the opposition of the elite and the mass. And if elite art and culture are formed in a rather closed space and presuppose the presence of professional communities, patrons and private connoisseurs of certain types and genres of art, then mass art and culture remain fundamentally, and in some places deliberately defiantly open. It is indicative that representatives of mass culture are oriented towards the widest audience and by all means strive to become recognizable and popular in the future. Such a situation creates the preconditions for mass art not only to be led by stereotypical cultural demands, but also to actively include plots and images of high art in the fabric of its artistic narratives. That is why today mass art and culture do not oppose themselves to elite culture, but act as a medium for the production and replication of high artistic ideals. The authors of the articles presented in this issue comprehensively consider the mechanisms of such adaptation, which create conditions for the emergence of a wide range of new products of mass culture. Thus, Olga Vanyushkina’s research on the mechanisms of artistic adaptation of the classic novel "Crime and Punishment" by F. M. Dostoyevsky in the manga of the same name by Japanese animator and Doctor of Philosophy Osamu Tezuka, who created about five hundred manga during his creative career, opens the "Names" rubric. The original drama of Dostoevsky's source material is qualitatively reworked and paradoxically presented in a comic key. This demonstrates the powerful demand of modern mass society for a varied and multi-genre interpretation of the classical culture of past epochs. Ekaterina Mitina, a freelance researcher from Moscow, offers a look at the practice of using the principles of theatrical drama in the long tradition of television intellectual show "What? Where? When?". The author, director, and host of this program, Vladimir Voroshilov, skillfully used the classic three-act dramatic scheme for the television episodes of this program. This allowed the beloved television show to have the features of a complex classic work, which, when presented in a modern television format, was simply doomed to national popularity. Elena Yakovleva, a Kazan-based philosopher, analyzes the extraordinary symbiosis of the elitist and the mass, the consumerist using the example of Andy Warhol, who in his professional activities managed to combine the ideology of consumerism with advertising and art in an original and defiant way. The seriality and banality of his works testify not only to the final enthronement of consumerism in Western society, but also vividly demonstrates the critical potential of the famous master's artistic rebellion against this state of affairs. Our “Traditions” column has brought together authors who study the practices of popularity formation in modernist and postmodernist art. Novgorod researchers Sergey Malenko and Andrey Nekita have been studying American horror films for many years and have sought to establish a list of the most popular plots of this segment of cinematic media content. Based on an analysis of extensive empirical material, they conclude that the popularity of horror films is largely due to more than a century-old tradition of visualizing the underlying militarization of official and everyday life for modern everyday people. The visual appeal of such extreme media content inevitably leads to the displacement of the traditional value system, which is immediately filled with an artificially ideologized and militarized everyday life. Ekaterina Kolomeitseva, a St. Petersburg philologist, continues the line of cinematic reflection in our issue and invites readers to turn to contemporary film series. Using the methodology of content analysis, she manages to identify the range of the most popular themes of soap operas. At the same time, the author specifically emphasizes that defining the role of soap operas in contemporary mass culture is an ambiguous matter. And the constant and everincreasing popularity of this genre among millions of viewers around the world testifies to the unconscious desire of their creators and fans with the help of the entertainment industry to get rid of or at least partially displace the burden of accumulated individual and social problems from the field of vision. Determining the typological features of contemporary art becomes the subject of discussion by Marina Okolovich and Olga Gulevich-Linkova, representing Yaroslav-the-Wise Novgorod State University. The authors argue that the specificity of contemporary art consistently reflects the peculiarities of the epoch and paradoxically combines populism and outrage, which actually deny the ideals of classical art. That is why, as the authors argue, postmodern art is either a peculiar parody of the classics, or a sign of preparation for a new, qualitative leap in the development of the artistic practices of civilization. The phenomenon of popularity and its study actually unites all the articles that are presented in this issue of our publication. The young researcher Vadim Tokarev also sets himself this task, arguing that popularity is largely influenced by the uniqueness of artistic style, the personal mythology of the artist and the correspondence of artistic practice to dynamically changing socio-cultural spaces. He draws such conclusions from a comparative study of the works of Van Gogh, Kandinsky and Picasso. The editorial board sincerely wishes the readers intellectual inspiration in reading the articles of the issue and expresses no doubt that it will inspire their own scientific creativity, including on the pages of our publication.

For article citations:
Malenko, S. A. (2023). Mass culture: temptation by the adapted “translation” from an elite language or conquering new heights? Experience industries. Socio-Cultural Research Technologies (EISCRT), 2 (3), 9–19.
https://doi.org/10.34680/EISCRT-2023-2(3)-09-19