I believe that some longer term historical perspective on all this makes more sense of it all.
"Cultural provision" has long fallen into separate classes - providing, initially, for the two main social classes that existed up to the Indistrial Revolution. For those, historically, with greater leasure time on their hands, domestics and so on, there was always time for the culture we now call "high culture", which includes classical music. For those further down the social scale, entertainment was preferable to inculcating "high culture", in which ideas presented were of a more complex, multi-levelled kind, calling for the asking of questions about the meaning of life, and to whose interpretation of that meaning the "lower orders" were supposed to pay attention.
The Victorian era's rich and powerful - the time when the working class acquired the mass characteristics that resulted in its potential to disrupt the smooth operation of "progress" - at first, in the later manner of Reith, (well some of them), pursued worthy patronage of arts to the masses beyond the town or country estate, but then went on to recruit the nonconformist orders as agents for defraying the potential for working class "trouble", whether by preaching abstinence or the virtues of patience and the respectability of parliamentary change for the betterment of conditions of life and work. Thus the working class organised its own culture and entertainment as best it could, entrepreneurial initiative on behalf of which being invested in pubs, musical halls, and then cinemas and holiday camps.
The arrival, post-WW2, post-rationing, of recognition by the Powers that individual purchasing power was now an indispensable part of what kept capitalism ticking over, (previously the working class existed primarily to provide disposable commodities for middle class consumption) did not essentially alter the pattern of differences between upper, middle and working class cultural consumption, for want of a better word; it guilded the lily of homegrown working class culture with the values of American escapism, individualism and standardised goods, as the old communitarian spirit was swept up, sliced up and boxed away in new estates and high rises. The convenient arrival of immigrants to provide cheap labour for the infrastructural sector vital for post-war reconstruction has changed the detail, but not, essentially, the purpose of parcelling and prepackaging the different cultural products and their targetting.
It is in the interests, I believe, of maintaining (while, importantly, controlling) patterns of what is consumed, that conflicting "interest groups", such as those of us who are in favour of reduced standards of expertise and so on in product (for such it is) specialising in the high arts, and those opposing such changes, continue and argue among ourselves. The shrinking of the "demographic" which holds to Reithian notions of civilisation resting on greater cultural enlightenment is intentional in that it serves to delimit access to those worlds of culture which encourage critical thinking to those sectors of society which were raised in times of hope and progress for all; the age range of the majority left listening to Radio 3 in vain hope that the values it once chapioned can still be rescued is no coincidence, I think.
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"Cultural provision" has long fallen into separate classes - providing, initially, for the two main social classes that existed up to the Indistrial Revolution. For those, historically, with greater leasure time on their hands, domestics and so on, there was always time for the culture we now call "high culture", which includes classical music. For those further down the social scale, entertainment was preferable to inculcating "high culture", in which ideas presented were of a more complex, multi-levelled kind, calling for the asking of questions about the meaning of life, and to whose interpretation of that meaning the "lower orders" were supposed to pay attention.
The Victorian era's rich and powerful - the time when the working class acquired the mass characteristics that resulted in its potential to disrupt the smooth operation of "progress" - at first, in the later manner of Reith, (well some of them), pursued worthy patronage of arts to the masses beyond the town or country estate, but then went on to recruit the nonconformist orders as agents for defraying the potential for working class "trouble", whether by preaching abstinence or the virtues of patience and the respectability of parliamentary change for the betterment of conditions of life and work. Thus the working class organised its own culture and entertainment as best it could, entrepreneurial initiative on behalf of which being invested in pubs, musical halls, and then cinemas and holiday camps.
The arrival, post-WW2, post-rationing, of recognition by the Powers that individual purchasing power was now an indispensable part of what kept capitalism ticking over, (previously the working class existed primarily to provide disposable commodities for middle class consumption) did not essentially alter the pattern of differences between upper, middle and working class cultural consumption, for want of a better word; it guilded the lily of homegrown working class culture with the values of American escapism, individualism and standardised goods, as the old communitarian spirit was swept up, sliced up and boxed away in new estates and high rises. The convenient arrival of immigrants to provide cheap labour for the infrastructural sector vital for post-war reconstruction has changed the detail, but not, essentially, the purpose of parcelling and prepackaging the different cultural products and their targetting.
It is in the interests, I believe, of maintaining (while, importantly, controlling) patterns of what is consumed, that conflicting "interest groups", such as those of us who are in favour of reduced standards of expertise and so on in product (for such it is) specialising in the high arts, and those opposing such changes, continue and argue among ourselves. The shrinking of the "demographic" which holds to Reithian notions of civilisation resting on greater cultural enlightenment is intentional in that it serves to delimit access to those worlds of culture which encourage critical thinking to those sectors of society which were raised in times of hope and progress for all; the age range of the majority left listening to Radio 3 in vain hope that the values it once chapioned can still be rescued is no coincidence, I think.
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