90977 - Pop Culture Theory

Learning outcomes

At the end of the Course the student: will know the essential aspects of the debates on pop culture will be able to contextualise mass culture and the poetics of pop will be able to reflect critically on communications mediated by symbolic forms of an aesthetic matrix; will be able to understand the aesthetic communicative practices linked to taste and beauty, and their role in the constitution of the image of individuals and groups, identities and lifestyles.

Course contents

Fashion and Rock Music between Avant-garde Art and Popular Culture. 

 The status and significance of popular culture has been often debated and discussed in the modern and contemporary age. Especially in the 20^th and 21^st century several aestheticians, art theorists and cultural critics have offered some influential categorizations of cultural and artistic phenomena in terms of “high culture” vs. “low culture”, “serious music” vs. “popular music”, “avant-garde” vs. “kitsch”, etc. Other theorists, however, have raised objections against such dualistic classification schemes, suggesting that there does not exist, in fact, a rigid and unbridgeable division between so-called “high fine arts” and “popular arts”, and arguing that especially the history of the arts in the 20^th century has offered many important examples of cultural products belonging to the domain of popular culture which, at the same time, had been significantly influenced by some developments of avant-garde art.

This Lecture Course will investigate the multidimensional imaginary of popular culture as a “prism” for a critical understanding of the Zeitgeist of the present age. With regard to this, the diverse fields of rock music and fashion appear particularly relevant and rich of important examples, also to understand the particular relation that artists must nowadays establish with the market and the domain of the culture industry (which includes the branches of the music industry, the film industry, the fashion industry, etc.). In this context, a specific attention will be paid in this Lecture Course to fashion and rock music (understood as two among the most influential aesthetic practices of our time), and more specifically: (1) to the relation of modern fashion with both avant-garde art and popular culture; (2) to the way in which stylistic components derived from the avant-garde have been fruitfully integrated and developed in the context of popular music, with a particular focus on two of the most important rock bands of the last decades: King Crimson and Radiohead. 

In the 1970s the guitarist and composer Robert Fripp (the founder of the band King Crimson) coined what we can consider the fundamental maxim (or, more emphatically, the “golden rule”) for artists who nowadays aim to establish an active, conscious and reflective relation with the culture industry, and thus aim to have a real control over their artistic creativity: “working in the marketplace but not governed by the values of the marketplace”, thus acting as “small, mobile, independent, intelligent units”, rather than being passively influenced and conditioned by the mechanisms of the culture industry and the logic of the market. Some of the manifold implications and consequences of this rigorous artistic attitude will be explored in this Lecture Course, with examples derived from the fields of both rock music and fashion. 

The bibliography may be subject to changes until the beginning of the Lecture Course.

Readings/Bibliography

Readings/Bibliography.

(A) Mandatory Readings for the Exam:

(1) Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, in Art and culture: Critical essays, Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. (Also available in B. Rosenberg and D. Manning White (ed.), Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, Glencoe: The Free Press, 1963, pp. 98-110).

(2) Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, Lanham-Boulder-New York-Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000 (2^nd edition), only Chapter 7 (“Form and Funk: The Aesthetic Challenge of Popular Art”).

(3) Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London-New York: Tauris & Co., 2003 (2^nd edition), only Chapter 8 (“Fashion and Popular Culture”).

(4) Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy, London: Reaktion Books, 2006, only Chapter 6 (“Fashion and Art”).

(5) Stefano Marino and Eleonora Guzzi, The Philosophy of Radiohead: Music, Technology, Soul, Milano-Udine: Mimesis International, 2024.

(6) Pete Tomsett, Fifty Shades of Crimson: Robert Fripp and King Crimson, London-New York: Bloomsbury, 2021.

The bibliography may be subject to changes until the beginning of the Lecture Course.

(B) Other suggested readings (for potential further developments, individual researches, etc.):

On Progressive Rock and King Crimson:

Eric Tamm, Robert Fripp: From King Crimson to Guitar Craft, London: Faber & Faber, 1990.

Edward Macan, Rocking the classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. Oxford- New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Bill Martin, Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock, 1968-1978, Open Court, 1997.

Kevin Holm-Hudson (ed.), Progressive rock reconsidered, London-New York: Routledge, 2002.

Bill Bruford, The Autobiography. Yes, King Crimson, Earthworks and More, London: Foruli Publications, 2009.

Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell, Beyond and before: Progressive rock since the 1960s, London-New York: Continuum, 2011.

Andrew Keeling, Musical Guide to “Lizard” by King Crimson, London: Spaceward Publications, 2018.

Bill Bruford, Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018.

On Radiohead:

J. Doheny, Radiohead. Karma Police: The Stories behind Every Song, Carlton, London, 2002.

T. Footman, Radiohead. Welcome to the Machine: OK Computer and the Death of the Classic Album, Chrome Dreams, New Malden, 2007.

B.W. Forbes and G.A. Reisch (eds.), Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter, Happier, More Deductive, Open Court, Chicago, 2009.

M. Letts Tatom, Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album: How to Disappear Completely, Indiana University Press, Bloomington (IL), 2010.

S. Hyden, This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s Kid A and the Beginning of the 21^st Century, Hachette Books, New York, 2021.

On Fashion:

Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology. An Introduction to Fashion Studies, New York: Berg, 2005.

Tim Edwards, Fashion in Focus: Concepts, Practices and Politics, London: Routledge, 2011.

Giovanni Matteucci and Stefano Marino (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Fashion, London-New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Gwenda-lin Grewal, Fashion | Sense: On Philosophy and Fashion, London-New York: Bloomsbury, 2022.

[The program (texts, topics, assessment method, etc.) is identical for both attending and non-attending students].

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Students with SLD or temporary or permanent disabilities.

It is suggested that they get in touch as soon as possible with the relevant University office (https://site.unibo.it/studenti-con-disabilita-e-dsa/en) and with the lecturer in order to seek together the most effective strategies for following the lessons and/or preparing for the examination.

Teaching methods

Traditional lectures and class discussions with students.

Assessment methods

The assessment method is written.

The program (texts, topics, assessment method, etc.) is identical for both attending and non-attending students.

The students will write a paper on at least 3 topics chosen from at least 3 texts in the Program of this Lecture Course, and send the paper to the teacher as email attachment (in Word format) at least 15 days before the day of the exam date published on AlmaEsami.

The teacher may ask the students to integrate and complete the exam (after the submission of the paper) with an oral conversation on the program.

All papers may be also assessed by the teacher through the use of anti-plagiarism softwares / plagiarism detectors.

The paper must be written using Times New Roman 12, and must be long 7.000 characters min. and 25.000 characters max. (blank spaces included).

The paper must include: Name of the student and Identification number (“Matricola”) / Title of the paper / Main Text (structured in sections or not) / Bibliography.

The students must read and study all the texts in the Program (not just one text; all texts must be read, as usually happens in every Lecture Course at the University).

The students can select then the topics from the various texts that are more interesting for them, and can choose to focus their paper on those topics.

It is important that the teacher can understand from the paper the student's level of knowlegde of the Program (as also happens in oral exams, for example, where the teacher may typically ask to the student various questions on the different texts in the Program, to try to understand the student's level of knowledge and understanding of the whole Program, and not just of a single text).

If a student wants to choose a case study and use it as a starting point to write his/her paper, this is, in principle, also acceptable (so that students, if they want, may also use their phantasy or use examples taken from their experiences with fashion, music, art, etc.), but it is important that students don't write their paper only on the event or phenomenon that they have freely chosen, but rather use it as an example to apply the concepts presented in the texts in the Program.

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The examination will ensure the achievement of the following objectives:

- knowledge of the main conceptual contents of the texts examined;

- general orientation concerning the characteristics of contemporary aesthetic culture;

- comprehension of the affinities and differences between heterogeneous philosophical approaches to popular culture;

- comprehension of the meaning of the concepts learned in relation to the concrete phenomena taken into account.

 

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Students with SLD or temporary or permanent disabilities.

It is necessary to contact the relevant University office (https://site.unibo.it/studenti-con-disabilita-e-dsa/en) with ample time in advance: the office will propose some adjustments, which must in any case be submitted 15 days in advance to the lecturer, who will assess the appropriateness of these in relation to the teaching objectives.

Teaching tools

The lessons will be supported by the multimedia material available in the classroom.

Office hours

See the website of Stefano Marino