Mass, popular and elite culture. Symptoms

An integral part of our life is the way of leisure. Someone reads detectives and listens to pop music, and some attend symphony concerts and get acquainted with the work of classic writers.

Elite culture, the signs of which will be listed below, refers to the second method of satisfying aesthetic and intellectual needs. In addition to it, there are also a mass culture and a popular culture. They also have certain characteristics.

A few words about other types of cultures

Mass culture, for example, is designed for the vast majority of society, for those people whose world view has no outstanding features. As a rule, these are citizens with a secondary education, workers in production or in the service sector.

Folk culture does not have an exact portrait of the consumer. It simply reflects the established traditions in specific communities. The preference of folk culture to its other species can not speak about the level of intellectual development.

The signs of "mass character" and "nationality" were examined above in general terms and only to see the difference with the subject under discussion. Elitist culture, the signs of which are rather difficult to characterize in a nutshell, is calculated for that stratum of the population, which is usually called the intelligentsia. This and other of its features will be discussed in more detail below.

Elite culture. Symptoms

So, it was already mentioned about the target audience. Intellectuals are, as a rule, people working in the intellectual sphere. These include teachers, scientists, museum workers, libraries, artists, writers, composers, and so on. However, one can not be categorical and state that an office worker (for example) can not be a connoisseur of masterpieces of elite culture.

And what are these masterpieces? Often they are deservedly called classics. This literary work, the relevance of which only increases after a lapse of hundreds, several hundred years. These are operas, sonnets, symphonies, ballet, theater, painting of great artists and monuments of talented sculptors.

In general, we can say that the subject under discussion was created over many centuries. Elitist culture, the signs of which we cover, it is in many ways - the creations of our predecessors. However, it is also impossible to say that the results of spiritual and intellectual activity of our contemporaries can be considered only to the next "mass baubles".

This is not all signs of an elite culture. Curiously, it has even a certain motto. It sounds like this: "Art for art's sake." And here you can immediately see the difference with the mass (money above the cultural value) and the people's (dressing the traditions, customs and views of a certain ethnic community in a material, oral or written form) cultures.

Elite culture. Examples

• Serious music (Bach, Mozart, Schnittke, Tchaikovsky, etc.).
• Highly intellectual literature (Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Ulysses, Kafka, Shakespeare, etc.).
• Fine arts (Michelangelo, Rodin, Eifel, Gropius, da Vinci, Van Gogh, etc.).