Steven Johnson Quotes

Hollywood is tied hand and foot to the demands for artificiality of the masses all over the world.

The pop culture tends to go to the lowest denominator, so cinema is in a weird place, due to its mass nature. It's diluted down to very little: simple stories and simple politics.

I'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

This is the age of insincerity. The movies had the misfortune to come along in the twentieth century, and because they appeal to the masses there can be no sincerity in them.

The gallery is generating work for the masses.

Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture.

TV is art. It's mass art. It's accessible to the masses.

Films are meant for the masses, for the purpose of entertainment.

If a show is wickedly, hugely popular, like 'Mad Men,' I assume that the masses, in their infinite inferiority to me, don't know what good TV is and that everyone is just brainwashed.

The reality television shows are a big hit with the masses with their Bollywood songs. Even if these TV shows are scripted, people are watching them.

At the end of the day, television is an entertainment platform and we are here to entertain the masses.

Things meant to appeal to the masses usually end up appealing to no one.

What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.

Pop culture is not about depth. It's about marketing, supply and demand, consumerism.

We're getting dumbed down, taste-wise.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.

Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.

Film, therefore, is part of society, not distant from it, easy to experience for people regardless of class.

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices.

The best shows succeed because they tap into a national conversation.

Every citizen in every country in the world now grows up in two nations. Their own and Hollywood.

In a lot of movies, especially big studio ones, they're not constructed in any other way than to get people to like them and then tell their friends. It's a product.