Book Review
A. John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture
Introduction
The book ‘Understanding Popular Culture’ by John Fiske highlights the conflicting responses popular culture can stir up. It takes a new approach in studying cultural artifacts. It discusses what popular culture is and what do popular ‘texts’ reveal about class, race and gender dynamics in a society. Furthermore, it differentiates mass culture- the cultural products put out by an industrialized, capitalist society between popular culture- the ways in which people use, abuse, and subvert these products to create their own meanings and message. Finally, this book presents a radically different theory of what it means for culture to be popular: that is, literally, of the people.
Fiske draws on examples from both sides of the Atlantic, in particular, the USA and the UK in making his concepts easier to understand. He analyzes popular “texts” to reveal both their explicit, implicit (and often opposite) meanings and uses, and the social and political dynamics they reflect. He also examines the multitude of meanings lying beneath the cultural artifacts that surround us in shopping malls, popular music and television.
‘Understanding Popular Culture’ highlights the conflicting responses that cultural phenomenon such as Madonna and the Chicago Sears Tower evoke. It locates popular culture as the point at which people take the goods offered them by industrial capitalism and turn them to their own creative and even subversive uses. Finally, it refutes the theory that a mass audience mindlessly consumes every product it is offered.
Criticisms
John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture deals with the popular use of the texts provided by a total culture industry. Because the popular culture is the culture of oppressed, the freedom of the oppressed here is a freedom of reading, interpreting and producing popular meanings out of the material provided by the dominant forces. (2003)
The problem of this approach affects the political immediacy of the theory as well as its perspectives since an absolute focus on the use of popular texts denies the possibility of people to take up other subject position than of the consumer. People simply cannot produce anything else than readings and meanings since they cannot match on the popular production of culture. In other words, popular culture is basically a culture of consumers, not producers. (2003)
This contributes to a separation of the spheres of politics and entertainment as a part of culture industry. In the contemporary situation where the dominant force is a corporate industrial-entertainment such approach can not account for the actuality of and aesthetization of politics. This aesthetization occurs predominantly by way of popular culture. (2003)
In his examination of Television Culture, John Fiske (1987) extends the tradition by holding that people are readers, reactors, and re-interpreters who bring their individual social residual factors to the television screen. Television has taken the role of dependent variable and the examination of a single television show as a delineation of viewers’ concerns. ( 2001)
He acknowledges that the television audience consists of socially produced viewers who work the remote control within the web of their own social interests. More specifically, he suggests that viewers scan for programs that provide them the textual space to mediate between who they are, what they see, and the way they interpret program content. ( 2001)
Thus, Fiske is correct in requesting audience research, which examines more than television’s influence, because to recognize the impact of viewer interactive reception in the social processing of meaning is to recognize the force and the reality of the social viewer. ( 2001)
On the other hand, he has been criticized for overestimating the individual as a free and acting agent. Critics of reception studies have pointed out that even if people interpret the programmes they watch, they do so within the framework of possible interpretations. Further, it has been argued that he neglects the importance of structural and institutional factors, and thereby gives the individuals a far too independent and active role when the individual makes use of cultural products. In Fiske’s analysis, (1996) argues that differences between class, gender, race and other social categories that construct meanings and identities, are leveled out to the degree that they faces the danger of trivializing social differences. (1998)
Point of View
I agree with John Fiske that popular culture is not consumption but a culture-the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system. I also agree that popular culture is not produced by the culture industry but made by the people themselves. All the culture industries can do is to produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture.
Nevertheless, the products of these industries become only a tool by means of which the people engage in the cultural task of determining meaning of their lives. Thus, pop culture has become a cultural phenomenon.
Popular culture also reflects and affects the values and outlooks that people construct for them. Pop cultural commodities may well be produced and distributed by industries that are motivated to a large degree by their own economic interests.
There could be also no popular dominant culture. It is determined by the forces of domination to the extent that it is always formed in reaction to them. But the dominant cannot control totally the meanings that the people may construct and the social allegiances they may form. The people are not the helpless subjects of an irresistible ideological system. They are free willed and biologically determined individuals. Members of the dominant social groups could also participate in popular culture. They must just reform their allegiances away from those that give them their social power.
B. Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs
Introduction
The book ‘Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs’ describes how Paul Willis followed a group of lads as they passed through the last two years of school and into work. It explains that the lads’ own culture blocks the teaching and prevents the realization of the aims of liberal education. It also exposes some of the contradictions within these formal aims and supplies the operational criteria by which a future wage labour is judged. Willis explores how their own culture can guide working class lads onto the shop floor. The ethnographic study of the lads showed how class and gender combined as they expressed their resistance to schooling through an aggressive masculinity and disruptive counter-school culture.
Willis argued that the lads formed a distinctive counter-school sub-cultural grouping characterized by opposition to the values and norm perpetuated throughout the school. According to him, lads showed little interest in academic work, preferring instead to amuse their selves as best they could through various forms of deviant behaviour. Academic work had no value for these boys who had little interest in gaining qualifications and saw manual work as superior to mental work. Furthermore, lads also tried to identify with the adult, non-school world, by smoking, drinking and expressing strongly sexist and racist attitudes.
Learning to Labour has come to be seen as seminal in terms of working class studies and is one of the most quoted education books ever. Its importance lay in giving a cultural dimension to already well argued structural accounts of pupil behaviour. It remains topical especially in the light of current media panics about the underachievement of boys, while its stress that the reason for male working class alienation from schooling lay in working class culture is an important foil to contemporary discourses on school effectiveness.
Criticisms
Willis evaluated the students, teachers, and parents in a school that was deemed a model of progressive education in England. He found that the reality of progressive education was very different from the promise. The students who received less attention were the lower performing children who were from lower working class families. On the other hand, the teacher spent more time with were higher performing children who were also from a higher social class. ( 1998)
He also concluded that the working class status of the boys was perpetuated by their own behavior and that working class behavior was given freer reign in progressive environments. The boys’ school behavior and values all corresponded directly with the culture of shop floor workers and served to ensure that the boys would inherit the working class status of their fathers. (1998)
The book is apparently a classic in the fields of cultural studies and ethnography. This study by Paul Willis is certainly free of the political correctness and obsession with romanticizing other cultures that later polluted the field and drained its credibility. Willis’ study on working class kids in England and the issues they face in joining the workforce can be seen as interesting in itself; as such issues were surely overlooked by lofty academics before and since. Especially rewarding is Willis’ method of actually making himself a believable member of a group of lower class boys at school and then following them into the industrial workforce after graduation. This adds an immense amount of credibility to the study. (2000-2006)
Willis’ work also painted a different picture of some working class children actively failing themselves by developing cultures of resistance in opposition to schooling. The book was ground breaking in its day and has continued to have a lasting impact on thinking about class and education. Its influence came primarily because it was the first major educational study to link culture and social action to wider structural processes. ()
Willis showed that the education system was failing to produce ideal compliant workers for the capitalist system. Rather the lads’ counter school culture contained some perceptive insights into the nature of capitalism for workers. The lads recognize that there are no equal opportunities under capitalism and no matter how hard they work their chances of success remain far lower than those of the middle class pupils. They can see through the careers advice given at school and know that even if they were to work really hard the chances of getting a professional or desk job are very low. (.)
There is recognition that individual effort is likely to achieve little in terms of future prospects and a strong investment in a male working class peer group. The book contrasts individual mobility and academic success, possible for the few, with the impossibility of educational success ever being a route of upward mobility for a whole class, and emphasizes the importance of peer group cultures. (.)
Point of View
The lads are correct to see that labour and its use is at the heart of their struggles including their struggles at school. Their refusal to cooperate at the school is equivalent to the withholding of labour; thus a form of class struggle. The lads can even penetrate the knowledge of labour as a special commodity which Willis believes that this confirms own discovery about labour. Turning to the education system, education exists and acts only beyond functional reproduction of culture. A certain amount of cultural demystification can take place in schools although this can still end in a reproduction of the system.
The form of resistance in school shows the strength of lads. What the lads succeeded in doing this is to deny the equivalence of teacher paradigms; thus denying that teacher can offer a route through school for working class kids. Working class culture prefers its own knowledge of reality and most importantly, the reality of the job market. Working class lads are correct to see that most work is meaningless and de-skilled in perceiving the structural nature of employment.
We could not deny the fact that this is still happening in Hong Kong and in other countries. Class distinction in the education system is rampant. Students from lower working families received less attention from teachers so they tend to be poor performers. However, their perspective is much superior to the official version of the realities supplied by the school since they engage lot of actual work and part-time work outside school.
Moreover, lower class children can’t reach the top classes since they don’t have social and culture capital. The teacher, on the other hand, spent more time with children from higher social class; thus they tend to be higher performing students. In other words, the teachers assumed that these children are going to end up working in class occupations.
C. Richard Florida’s the Rise of the Creative Class: and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life
Introduction
This book gives us a challenging new way to think about why we live as we do today and where we might be heading. ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’ weaves a storytelling with masses of new and updated research. Richard Florida traces the fundamental theme that runs through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing role of creativity in our economy.
It chronicles the ongoing sea of change in people’s choices and attitudes, and shows not only what’s happening but also how it stems from a fundamental economic change. It now comprises more than thirty percent of the entire workforce whom the choices have already had a huge economic impact.
Just as William Whyte’s 1956 classic, ‘The Organization Man’ that showed how the organizational ethos of that age permeated every aspect of life; Florida describes a society in which the creative ethos is increasingly dominant.
He explains the rise of a new social class that he labels the creative class. Members include scientists, engineers, architects, educators, writers, artists, and entertainers. He defines this class as those whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and new creative content.
In general this group shares common characteristics, such as creativity, individuality, diversity, and merit. The author estimates that this group has 38 million members, constitutes more than 30 percent of the U.S. workforce, and profoundly influences work and lifestyle issues.
The purpose of this book is to examine how and why we value creativity more highly than ever and cultivate it more intensely.
Criticisms
Richard Florida’s ‘The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life’ is at the forefront of an influential meme that’s being taken quite seriously by regional economic planners around the nation. The magic formula at the heart of Florida’s book is that planning communities that will attract the creative type leads to economic prosperity. ( 2003)
According to Florida, the creative class is one of two major economic classes of the new economy. It is the super-creative core that constitutes 12 percent of the American workforce. The core of this class in people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content. Join to these are the creative professionals in business, finance, law and health care who engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital. However, he neglects an essential line of demarcation: who owns the rights to innovation. It is the topic that Florida never tackles. (2003)
On a conceptual level, , it’s hard to accept Florida’s claim that the undeniable shift from an industrial economy to an information and services economy implies a parallel shift from productivity to creativity since according to him, the creativity that defines the common interests of intellectual-property lawyers and freelance writers is strongly associated with the Bohemian lifestyle preference of the bourgeois-bohemian. Thus, if the creativity has replaced productivity as the measure of a worker’s status in new economy, then the economic power of the new economic elite rests on monopolistic control of intellectual property. ( 2003)
It is also argue that while the creative class is unquestionably a blessing to the economy as a whole; at the regional level the picture is hardly so rosy. Florida says that they choose cities for their tolerant environments and diverse populations as well as good jobs. This is where gays and bohemians come in. Towns that have lots of them, as Florida argues, are more likely to have creative-class workers, high-tech industry and, as a result, strong economic growth. Not because there are disproportionate numbers of gays and bohemians in high-tech jobs, he explains, but because their presence signals an open-minded and varied community of the sort that appeals to software engineers and entrepreneurs. Most economists would agree, but that doesn’t mean they buy Florida’s creative capital theory as the explanation. ( 2003)
Richard Florida has effectively linked the concepts of a lively arts community and economic development. He shows with a great deal of statistics, that those cities with the greatest percentage of artists also have the greatest rates of economic growth. He attributes this to the creative class looking for a community in which they find an active arts community, a lively street environment, diversity and tolerance. These above average earners then move to those communities that offer these assets and the opportunity to participate in outdoor activities. Only then do they look for a job. However, ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’ is not a blueprint for the redevelopment of a city but it is a good guidepost to determine the direction. (2006)
Point of View
‘The Rise of Creative Class’ is very bold and seductive. It challenges our current orthodoxy. In classical thinking, all things being equal, people migrate primarily to places where they can find jobs, rather than to a liberal city with only a blind faith that they will find employment. Jobs exist because highly creative people built them. It is this elite group that is the strongest magnets pulling other creative people to them, rather than to the city per se.
Florida’s book is extremely well written. His theories are tightly argued, and backed up with a wealth of research data. However, I don’t believe that the creative class exists. . His idea of a creative class is encompassing since he is just redefining middle class professionals. What he studied are just changes in interests and values of the growing middle class.
The creative class, according to Florida is people in occupations which require high level of training and education. Many people are in these types of job at present. My point is that people can be found in all occupations and walks of life. We cannot equate the level of difficulty in performing a job to the element of creativity in it. There are creative workers but there is no creative class.
Take for example the case of Hong Kong. It is seen that there is no such creative class here since Hong Kong people tend to seek for money returned quietly. They did not develop creative industries but merely enhancing technology and innovations. People are just creative workers.
Literature Review on Visual Arts
This chapter presents the review of related literature about visual arts, community-based art education and cultural identity through visual arts to further support the study about the community-based art education in Tin Shui Wai.
The review posters the need to become aware, respect and conserve the historical and cultural heritages in Tin Shui Wai through realization of the importance of the community-based art education and visual arts.
Nature of Visual Arts
The visual arts are arts that we see. Paintings, drawings, visual designs, photography and computer art are examples of visual arts. Visual works of art stay in one place, unmoving, while we observe them.
The arts have its own language, language that is different from our normal spoken language. Feeling like emotion, intuition and other form or idea without words is the language of the visual arts just like the other arts.
We can discover worlds of experience that are all around us or inside us that cannot be described quickly or easily with mere words through paintings, drawings and other visual arts. Visual arts help us give meaning to what seems meaningless as well as to recapture feelings and experiences that we had once or would like to have again. (2002)
Visual arts are powerful for most of us since we are a very visual race. We are primarily visual sensors of five-sense data. So much of what we experience can be identified and recalled much more quickly with one picture since a picture as the old saying goes is worth a thousand words. We also have parts of our brains very well trained from infancy to absorb and process visual images, brain parts that are quite different from those that process verbal thinking. Thus, we are very primed and ready for the visual stimulation of the visual arts. ( 2002)
The artist, though unspoken, is communicating with us when he creates a visual work of art such as painting. His words are not spoken things but rather through color, line, shape and texture. There are so many different things an artist can say just by making the different combinations in the art work. ( 2002)
For example, what does red make us feel? What does grey? What does a bunch of sharp, jagged lines, as opposed to a series of gentle curves, make us feel, especially when they are drawn in forms we recognize such as sharp, jagged eyebrows or gently curving ones? ( 2002)
There are so many other ways that an artist can deliver the message without speaking. Paintings and works of art in general are meant to move us, especially in ways that words often can’t. We shouldn’t be looking for some kind of abstract symbolic meaning or other intellectual idea when we search for the meaning of a painting since it may be there intellectually or it may not. What really is there is feeling. ( 2002)
This is what we should first search for in trying to figure out what the painting or photograph means. We can develop a wider and far- seeing eye for what the artists really trying to do by letting ourselves aim to discover the feelings of a visual work of art. ( 2002)
Importance of Visual Arts
Visual arts play a vital role in schools since it develop the intelligence and the overall personality of the students. Studies have shown that students who are exposed to visual arts tend to display above average intelligence when it comes to mathematics and science. ()
Students who are greatly exposed to visual arts have been observed to exhibit refined manners and develop a much-matured outlook on life. Most educators have also noticed that students perform better in class when visual arts are incorporated in their curriculum. ()
Moreover, visual arts provide meaningful self-expression of all students. This is the reason why a great number of educators have integrated visual arts in some of their subject areas in the curriculum. ()
Applying the knowledge and the skills in visual arts as well as considering the historical concepts of the visual art works to the student’s ever-expanding personal world creates appreciation of their own values and likewise appreciate the values of others and somehow discover the connection of visual arts to the universal needs of people in terms of their values and beliefs. ()
Visual arts are also used in therapy procedures for aiding child development. It assists in educating disabled children, especially those who are blind and have hearing problems. Moreover, visual arts also help in building communities and mural projects. It also used to provide education for mentally ill individuals. At present, continuous studies are being conducted to discover more benefits derived from incorporating visual arts in educating students. ()
Community-Based Art Education
Community-based art education is an organized community art programs to improve art skills and alternately outreach programs to empower special groups of people. It is a program that promotes contextual learning about local art and culture. Examples of community-based art education are the community service projects and the public art itself. (2006)
The community-based art education is a teacher initiated. Informal education is provided by this visual culture. With the expansion of technology and visual media, increasing numbers of citizens are learning about a range of issues through imagery. Thus, we could consider this as another form of community-based art education. ( 2006)
There are reasons why educators feel the need to contemplate community-based art education. First, well intentioned citizens try to figure out what they can do to support or reform school art programs. Second, arts administrators seek to advance their enrollment figures. Third, citizens try to eliminate art education from school curriculums. Fourth, teachers try to figure out how to get students involved in “real world” situations. And lastly, educators and artists confront important social issues through their artistic endeavors. (2006)
At the risk of drifting away from some of the traditional focuses of art education, art educators need to take a careful look at the rationales, goals, and definitions of community-based art education before dismissing it, or conversely, implementing new programs of their own. ( 2006)
Today, with our pluralistic postmodern perspectives, arts educators often design new community-based programs specifically for local citizens and special groups including at-risk youth, homeless individuals, older adults, handicapped people, gifted and talented individuals, the incarcerated, and others not always included in mainstream K-12 art classrooms. Such programs take place in schools, park facilities, arts centers, art museums, retirement centers, and store-front galleries, in addition to local, state and federal prisons. Sponsoring institutions are often nonprofit and governmental, although one can also find a growing number of for-profit businesses where individuals can “drop in” to use studio facilities. ( 2006)
Community-based programs and projects have a continuum of purposes. At one extreme of the spectrum reside programs that teach traditional art skills and knowledge. Others are about learning to appreciate local cultures with no intent of social reconstruction. At the far end of the spectrum are projects designed for social change. The art teachers should not be concerned about the duplication of their efforts. They should incorporate the strengths of what students are learning in both informal and more organized extra-curricular education. Since students learn much about art in their individual communities, teachers should build on what they have already learned. (2006)
Today, community-based art education is the dominant method by which individuals learn about art. ( 2006)
Cultural Identity and the Visual Art
Art education is culturally identified as a subject area that enables children to use their imagination and creativity to produce pieces of artwork from a wide variety of materials. This identification may also include the study of famous artists and their well-known artwork. (1999).
The cultural identity is constructed through various signs and symbols that the culture attribute to art education. Symbols include art making materials. (1999).
Another example of art education symbols are the variety of medias- both two and three dimensional that are used to illustrate subject matter. In addition to more practical symbols of art education are the humanitarian symbols which may include connecting with artists and their work, both contemporary and historical. (1999).
The art and crafts around communities, in stores and on posters will always be a symbol of a reflection of art education. (1999).
Another facet of creating a cultural identity is to reflect on the cultural rituals that are often associated with art education. The most apparent rituals include the various processes that are employed to make art. It is important to remember that such rituals/processes are influenced by the geographical location of the school district. (1999).
Another cultural ritual attributed to art education is the physical demonstration that the art teacher must provide for students in order to teach them specific techniques. This demonstration often includes safety precautions as rituals that the students will then strictly employ to create art without hurting themselves with the tools in the making. (1999).
Other ritual distinctive to art education is the practice of critiquing students’ art work, often done by the whole class in order to provide constructive feedback and criticism of the finished piece of art. One final ritual that should be imperative to an art education program is class field trips to museums, galleries, and artists studios that connect the learning of art in the school to actually viewing art in the community. (1999).
It is important to connect these cultural rituals and symbols of art education to not only show how they produce a cultural identity, but also form a sense of social solidarity among students, teachers, and communities. (1999).
Summary
The visual arts are arts that we see. It has its own language-the language of feelings, emotions and ideas without words. We could discover the world outside and inside us through visual arts. The visual artist through unspoken can communicate with us when he creates visual work of arts like painting. Paintings and works of art in general are meant to move us, especially in ways that words often can’t.
Visual arts play a major role not only in academic purposes but also in health and medicare related aspect and in the community as well. It develops the intelligence and the overall personality of the students. Moreover, visual arts also provide meaningful self-expression of all students. It is used in therapy procedures for aiding child development. It assists in educating disabled children, especially those who are blind and have hearing problems. And finally, visual arts also help in building communities and mural projects.
As an alternative to the traditional art education, the community-based art education providing an informal education in visual art was designed. This community-based art education is specifically for local citizens and special groups including at-risk youth, homeless individuals, older adults, handicapped people, gifted and talented individuals, the incarcerated and others not always included in mainstream K-12 art classrooms.
Community-based programs and projects have a continuum of purposes. At one extreme of the spectrum reside programs that teach traditional art skills and knowledge. Others are about learning to appreciate local cultures with no intent of social reconstruction. At the far end of the spectrum are projects designed for social change. Visual arts and cultural identity are related. The cultural identity is constructed through various signs and symbols that the culture attribute to art education.
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