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Entertainment is a business. The global entertainment market reached 247 USD billion in 2022. But should we view entertainment as art? And should art be entertaining?
Who decides what is high culture, and what is popular culture? Does a cultural product have less value because of its medium?
Consider this; streaming services like Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+ reinvented episodic storytelling and brought in the “Golden Age of Television,” predictably generating 139 billion dollars by 2027. Such well-known, and critically acclaimed auteurs of film-making as Tim Burton (Wednesday), Paolo Sorrentino (The Young Pope), or Jane Campion (Top of the Lake) are now directing to a platform that they never would have considered a decade ago. In the 80’s and 90’s movies could be art, television was considered popular culture, and thus less worthy of artistic expression by default. Now, we watch television on our phones, or laptops and make streaming services extremely rich.
Could something be high culture if it is popular? Does popularity make a cultural product worthy of critical attention?
Take the example of the upcoming movie, Barbie. Many consider Barbie, and Ken the most popular dolls of the past 60 years. However, the writer-director shooting a movie about them is the acclaimed, and Oscar-nominated, indie darling, Greta Gerwig. The movie is expected to be a box-office phenomenon, and a hit with the critics.
Are you interested in filmmaking, communication studies, game development, marketing, writing, or in any way working with stories? The aim of this module is to give you the necessary tools to analyze and create cultural texts regardless of their medium while understanding their wider sociological, aesthetic, and theoretical context. With the assistance of some of the oldest tropes of storytelling, we will be exploring essential questions of Film and Media Studies, Social Anthropology, Literary Criticism, and Gender Studies.
Module leader: Szentpály Dalma
