Herbert J. Gans

I won't be able to finish. I knew he was blowing it out of his ass when he said that popular culture should be taxed to support high culture. Culture exists because of the financial support of its patrons, not at the whim of a central cultural authority. If it doesn't pay, it doesn't play. Shakespeare knew that. So did Johnson. Joyce didn't know and we got that grad student doorstop 'Ulysses'. Really, just an aggravating book and typical of the sanctimonious editorializing that passes for show more academic discussion where nicely parsed models are fobbed off as insight. Read Warshow's 'The Immediate Experience' instead, top it off with Chesterton's essay 'In Praise of Penny Dreadfuls' and you've left Gans far behind. show less

Gans does a nice job of debunking certain elitist assumptions about the effects of popular culture that too often go unchallenged.

An apologia for pop culture that is dated and wrong. When it was written it might just have been believable That "people have a right to their culture of preference without denigration". Denigration is still right but surely this doesn't imply that we should accept pop culture without criticism or that we should be blind to the tacky and trivial nature of much of it, and it's effects in degrading taste and discrimination and creating a MacDonolised monoculture.

I found his analysis of different taste cultures to be helpful, but pretty much flat-out disagree with a lot of what he implies. Would have been much better to do a full update of this book, rather than a postscript that allows the writer to dodge inconsistencies between old text and current reality.