Theory with a Capital T

Those whose knowledge of the study of popular culture is based on what has come out of the American academy in recent decades may be pardoned for assuming that any intellectually respectable consideration of a work of popular culture must have a single-minded focus on its political impact and a corresponding refusal to consider its artistic quality. The error may be pardonable, but the assumption is still wrong. Before and despite the contemporary institutionalization of popular culture studies in the university, usually under the aegis of “culture studies,” many writers and critics, including some now classified as irremediably elitist, have believed that popular art at its best could both “delight and teach,” in Horace’s famous phrase. Insisting on looking at popular art first as art rather than as sociological data, they have found that works of popular culture at their best made their impact by the same sort of “selection and concentration,” to use T. S. Eliot’s words praising the music hall performer Marie Lloyd, that is a hallmark of fine art. It was because Marie Lloyd’s act was “all a matter of selection and concentration” that Eliot paid tribute to her as “the greatest music-hall artist of her time in England.” Unlike lesser performers she did not need to depend on “the grotesque” or “exaggeration” for humor. Eliot’s essay on Marie Acad. Quest. (2010) 23:469–480 DOI 10.1007/s12129-010-9194-7

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