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Okay, this one is getting the tags. I think it's important. Spread it around if you're so kind.

I've noticed that there has, throughout history, been an ever-changing term for 'art I like but feel a little bit bad about liking so much.' You know, terms like 'guilty pleasure,' 'slop,' etc. We enjoy them, but we use these terms that have intrinsically negative connotations when describing them, as if trying to preemptively acknowledge their flaws lest we be ridiculed for ignoring them.

Stop it. Cut it out.

Like so many things, that collective cultural guilt has its roots in classism and racism and it's wrong and I'm tired of it. It's part of the long-standing separation between so-called 'high art' and the mire of everything else implied to be 'low art.' And while I can't solve those deep-rooted cultural issues (or at least if I can, no one has told me how) as a professional author I'd like to propose something to salve them with my preferred weapon: words. 

(Quick credentials blast: I've written eleven books across four series over the course of the last five years. Writing is my full-time job and I hear I'm at least decent enough at it to make a very comfortable living, for whatever questionable worth that has as a measure of skill. I care a lot about art and think a lot about art. Okay, we good? Good.)

First, it is important to acknowledge that the distinction between high art and low art has not persisted exclusively through the dark, evil will of the Mystical Cabal of Nebulously-Defined Bigots. The phrasing persists because it does actually touch on a very relevant difference between what I think most people intuitively understand as the two major types of art, particularly (but not exclusively) in longform media, i.e., TV shows, movies, video games, books, etc. Traditionally, 'high art' has an ephemerally different feel to it. It makes you think about things. It makes you have to wrangle with your own emotions. It makes you cry, or wonder, or do one of several other rather exhausting but rewarding mental activities. Meanwhile, 'low art' is just… fun. It's nice. It's funny. It's entertaining. It could not more obviously still be art, but it's… different. It doesn't move you on a deep level, and it was never trying to. If anything, it's a nice way to keep comfortably still.

AND THAT'S FINE, ACTUALLY. That's okay. It is, I would in fact argue, essential to the human experience and human society as a whole! News flash: people need to relax sometimes. Crazy idea, I know. We don't have to pretend it's somehow intrinsically low-brow to enjoy an action movie or laugh at a comedy sketch. That is a wretched thing to do to our own culture.

So that's where the alternative names I've been cooking come in: relaxation and revelation. I do think, as someone who likes to focus on the latter where possible, that both are immeasurably important. Art, when created for revelation, has immense potential to move and change a person. It is a teaching tool, it is an outlet for pain, it is a way to feel seen and understood and loved in a wide and often horrible universe. Much of my worldview has been fundamentally altered for the better thanks to transformative works of art, and they are so, so, so important to society and good for humans in general. All of that just… isn't a good reason to get weird and gatekeepy about it.

Because again, relaxation is also important. I imagine a hypothetically healthy person (I've never met one and I doubt you have either but thankfully that doesn't stop us from using them as a reference somehow) would take time to enjoy quite a bit of both. And all art (again, especially longform art) has elements of both, because it's all very subjective! A piece of revelatory art that is making a point about something you've already internalized and understood isn't going to rock your world, but it might be entertaining. And likewise, while I would be mildly concerned for you if you walked out of, say, Michael Bay's Transformers with a fundamentally altered outlook on life, my horror does not make your revelation any less valid. This is something I think we should work to internalize as a culture, and the first step for that is to stop using negative-connotated language about our own entertainment.

I think the thing is that there's at least three different loosely related things that someone might mean when they say something is high art.

The first would be an appeal to a vague sense of elitism or classism. Music that most people would call "classical music" is ubiquitous in otherwise everyday film soundtracks and advertising, but it still maintains some status as music for middle and upper-class older folks, listening to classical for most people is in some way "classy" in a way that country or rock music aren't. This one is pretty hard to define specifics but pretty easy to identify based on vibes.

The second is a statement about why a work of art was made. Is a work more commercial or personal? Was it aimed at a small group of people, or society at large? (Or perhaps no one at all?) Was it the product of committee, subject to the whims of stockholders, or does it reflect the artistic ideals of someone whose wild creative freedom was tempered by their peers and collaborators instead of market research?

The third thing someone might mean is more focusing on, for lack of a better word, the consumption of a work. Who experiences it and why? Is it reproduced in mundane settings, for casual purposes, or is it seen as sacrosanct and treated with great care? Is it widely popular or the kind of thing that has a small but passion group of weird people on the internet who are obsessed with it? Do people usually read a novel as a pastime, something to literally pass the time, or as a more serious hobby or form of self-enrichment?

Now I think we can all agree that the first idea of high art is quite silly and pointless. Lots of things that were very explicitly pop culture rather than elite in their day (Shakespeare, Dickens, Homer, arguably even Dostoevsky!) have been partially or entirely relegated to being seen as elite by changing tastes and the passage of time. There's no reason not to encourage anyone and everyone to read and watch and listen to things they might enjoy purely bcuz its seen as Artsy or Serious or what have you.

The second and third are more interesting though. The third is the one you're to my mind implicitly invoking with a distinction between relaxation and revelation, and I like that distinction! Its rather Barthesian, at the end of the day all we have is our own individual experience of any given piece of art, so why shouldn't we think about art in terms of how it affects us?

That said I do think the second idea of high vs low art is perhaps the more useful for analyzing and categorizing art. The things someone finds revelatory in art are going to vary a lot from person to person, and plenty of people read some pretty emotionally or spiritually heavy stuff quite casually to relax. (And then there's my grandfather, who spent much of his twilight years reading the Encyclopedia Britannica volume by volume in alphabetical order...) But there seems to me a pretty strong connection between art that's made to say something, that speaks strongly from the soul of someone or a group of people, and art that can be revelatory. And on the other hand, art that's made almost exclusively as a product, as a cynical thing designed to upset or challenge as few people as possible while still being generally entertaining so it can sell as many copies as possible? It's pretty rare that this kind of art really touches someone in my experience, much less changes their life. As you said, the idea of Transformers: Dark of the Moon being life changing is so unlikely as to seem almost horrifying.

And honestly, as is probably clear from the way I write about it, I do rather think we should be critical of low art in that second sense (and only in that second sense!) There's nothing wrong with the enjoyment of such art, much less being moved or finding it meaningful, but I think sometimes about folk stories and fairy tales. That used to be "low" literature. Stories passed down from person to person, told to children and shared around fires and over tables. Stories recognizably persevered across generations, hundreds or even thousands of years! How many of us have experienced either side of that interaction as adults? Vanishingly few, though it still has its echos in fanfic communities and a few other places on the internet. Surely it is a loss that the process of telling simple stories purely for fun or entertainment has become, for nearly all of us, a process of consuming mass media made for profit? At the very least it seems that way to me. And that's to say nothing of the countless wonderful works we might have if more of our filmmakers and writers and musicians were freed from the need to appeal to market and turn a profit and could just make whatever strange and delightful things they wanted.

when your roommate is a really handsome woman by 于钦然

"They've got nobody in the Odyssey?"

"No I'm saying they don't got nobody."

"Nobody's there?"

"Nobody's not there!"

"So everyone's there?"

"Everybody but nobody!"