The Science Behind Popular Art
A look at the patterns that shape popular culture
by Poojil Tiwari
Popular culture is the set of practices, beliefs, and objects that embody the most broadly shared meanings of a social system. It includes media objects, entertainment and leisure, fashion and trends, and linguistic conventions, among other things. Popular culture is usually associated with either mass culture or folk culture and differentiated from high culture and various institutional cultures (political culture, educational culture, legal culture, etc.). (Danesi 2012)(Kidd 2017)
The juxtaposition of popular culture with mass culture furthers the idea that these cultural performances are embraced by everyone. This popularity, therefore, acts as an endorsement of such conventions as representative of all sections of society. From an archival perspective, popular culture gives us an insight into the practices most prevalent during a particular time. Ideas represented in popular culture, become codified for later generations as cultural practices. Therefore, it becomes important to examine our popular culture not only to better trace the impacts of real-time evolutions in society but also to chart how diverse communities get represented in the media.
The critique of popular media largely remains restricted in two spheres—academia and notion. The first involves critical analysis in pedantic, academic language that often remains inaccessible to the average consumer of such media due to the publication mediums. The latter is the critique by the consumer that often happens in-passing—arm-chair experts in conversations discussing their favorite fandoms with the depth of a doctoral candidate. However, this sphere lacks the structured framework to comprehensively critique a particular area in a manner that the critique can be reproduced later. My aim is to bridge the gap between the two. In using techniques of data-driven journalism, I hope to combine academic critique and relate it to people in an interactive and engaging manner. The cornerstone of the project is the original research I have undertaken in order to explore popular perceptions surrounding a particular field and fill the gaps in data availability. Supplementing this process are narratives of people who are actively contributing to the creation and consumption of popular media today, to get a sense of how the data and patterns play out on individual levels.
I aim to explore the formation of popular ‘art and media’ as they happen today. To some degree, I even hope to influence them so that they better, and more holistically represent the realities of today. In tracing the patterns that lie underneath what constitutes popular art, I posited three questions that need to be answered: