Popular culture and fashion are often regarded as something transient, of lesser substance than high art. But every piece of high art begins as pop culture. The stuffy classical musicians know that Franz Liszt, the famed 19th century pianist, was one of the first rock-star-esque celebrities. Women would chase him around with scissors trying to get locks of his hair, and would even collect his discarded cigar butts. Back then, he was a popular artist that even had a craze named after him: they called it Lisztomania! Pop culture is the origin of high art.
This applies to modern popular culture, too. It has commonly been observed that superheroes, like Marvel and D.C. characters, are the modern equivalent of Greek mythology. When the Greeks created mythological gods and heroes, those gods and heroes were the subject of a lot of their art. They made statues of mythical figures and told stories about them. They wrote epic poetry about them and painted frescoes of them. Modern comic book characters occupy the same sort of place in our own culture. Superman models and Batman movies do the same thing for us that statues of Zeus and epic poems about Achilles did for the Greeks.
That’s why we blog about popular culture. Not because it’s hot right now, but because we want to document, celebrate, and comment on popular culture. And we do that because popular culture is just plain culture.
