Cultural Hierarchy Quotes

The chief is the chief. He is the eagle who flies high and cannot be touched by the spit of the toad.

Icy and earthy, Helen Mirren is a rare, regal presence in a movie age that values the plebeian over the patrician and mass over class. Lauded with an Oscar and an Emmy for playing both Queen Elizabeths, Mirren has matched her cool aristocracy with a boldness of performance and display.

Some people think that movements, such as the movements in ballet, are a higher cultural expression, whereas some are just dirt. I think it is elitist to think that a trained movement is more acceptable than untrained and possibly unrehearsed movements.

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

I like the elitism of the art world. I think art for the people is a terrible idea.

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

People always say "pop culture." As if we have some high culture to distinguish it from.

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.

The idea that popular arts were shallow by definition and the traditional arts were profound was dead, I thought, and I wanted to prove it.

I don't think the distinction between high and low culture exists anymore.

There is a lot of snobbery towards pop music, to me and pop in general - it's kind of a despised art form.

Of course, you wouldn't want to re-create the era of aristocracy; it was a totally unfair era. The finer aspects of it were admirable, and so there's nostalgia for that: the behavior, the values, the cultural sensitivities.

I think the films we see, the Hollywood films, which are basically entertainment, will still be there, but they'll be in a totally different category. People won't take them seriously. They'll kind of end up the way comic books have. A side view of things.

When I was in Holland, the idea was, all cultures are equal and all are to be preserved. My idea was, no, all humans are equal, but not all cultures are equal.

I think the merging of high and low culture is so fascinating.

The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.

When I was growing up, there was a feeling in one's living room as much as in one's local gallery that a little elitism was good for the soul.

Because I'm associated with an avant-garde sensibility, people think I'm looking down on popular culture, but I don't want to be part of a new elitism.

One of the things I don't like about film is its incredible immersive quality. It's kind of bullying - it's very big, it's very flashy, it's got a lot of weight and it throws it around almost to the detriment of the rest of our culture.

It was my idea for high culture and popular culture to be treated equally.

With globalization and with a lot of power evaporating from the nation-states, the late-19th century established hierarchies of importance, or 'pecking orders' of cultures, presenting assimilation as an advancement or promotion, dissolved.

The middlebrow, I hate.