Pop Culture
In this model, the top floors of the building house high culture, such as ballet, the symphony, art museums, and classic literature. The bottom floors—and even the basement—house popular or low culture, including such icons as soap operas, rock music, radio shock jocks, and video games. High culture, identified with “good taste,” higher education, and support by wealthy patrons and corporate donors, is associated with “fine art,” which is available primarily in libraries, theaters, and museums. In contrast, low or popular culture is aligned with the “questionable” tastes of the masses, who enjoy the commercial “junk” circulated by the mass media, such as reality TV, celebrity gossip Web sites, and violent action films. Whether or not we agree with this cultural skyscraper model, the high-low hierarchy often determines or limits the ways in which we view and discuss culture today.
The participation of the mass media, ensuring an adequate and extensive coverage of cultural events, is evident in most segments of Italy's cultural life. Some recent research shows that the extent of reporting on cultural events on Italian radio, TV, and especially in the newspapers is relatively high compared with some other European countries, including those with cultural policy models similar to the French model. Not only do newspapers and other media follow cultural events in their regular sections, but they also help to organize and sponsor specific cultural events of national and international significance and become directly involved in their promotion and marketing.
However, not all the sectors of culture have benefited from media involvement in the cultural field. The steadily rising influence of omnipresent television chains in Italy is a factor that is likely to change the behavior of potential consumers of traditional cultural forms. The cinema, for instance, is certainly a subsegment of the performing arts which has suffered most from the widening of TV audiences. During the 1970s, more than one quarter of the cinema-goers abandoned the practice, only to be followed by an even more dramatic drop of almost 60% during the 1980s. The phenomenon is to be ascribed to the liberalization of private channels in the late-1970s and the fact that there is no legal restriction concerning the amount of films shown on TV in Italy.
The participation of the mass media, ensuring an adequate and extensive coverage of cultural events, is evident in most segments of Italy's cultural life. Some recent research shows that the extent of reporting on cultural events on Italian radio, TV, and especially in the newspapers is relatively high compared with some other European countries, including those with cultural policy models similar to the French model. Not only do newspapers and other media follow cultural events in their regular sections, but they also help to organize and sponsor specific cultural events of national and international significance and become directly involved in their promotion and marketing.
However, not all the sectors of culture have benefited from media involvement in the cultural field. The steadily rising influence of omnipresent television chains in Italy is a factor that is likely to change the behavior of potential consumers of traditional cultural forms. The cinema, for instance, is certainly a subsegment of the performing arts which has suffered most from the widening of TV audiences. During the 1970s, more than one quarter of the cinema-goers abandoned the practice, only to be followed by an even more dramatic drop of almost 60% during the 1980s. The phenomenon is to be ascribed to the liberalization of private channels in the late-1970s and the fact that there is no legal restriction concerning the amount of films shown on TV in Italy.