There are several narrations when it comes to popular culture. The first one promotes the notion of mass culture and uses a highly critical language inherited from the Frankfurt school. It disparages almost all popular artefacts and texts. Pop culture, as opposed to art, is viewed as manipulation and slander, an anti-democratic force which enslaves the Western mind and starts colonising more and more areas within the global village. You prefer The Bold and the Beautiful to a new performance by Sarah Kane? Then you are done for; you have fallen into the pop-cultural trap. The second narration is more neutral; pop culture has both positive and negative aspects. It is hard to say what is worse: the furious attacks on the culture industry or the watered-down ambivalence. However, there is one more, newer version of this story, which admits that popular culture indeed used to lack in quality but today we are witnessing a rebirth in mass entertainment. This claim is usually supported by the example of TV series connected with the phenomenon of the so-called quality TV. Is there even one person left who did not watch at least one episode of Desperate Housewives, Lost or Ally McBeal? Well, we still have to say that none of these three narrations is adequate. Why? This is the main topic of this issue of ‘MOCAK Forum’.

The idea of creating this issue was born during the preparation of the Sport in Art exhibition, opened 18^th May 2012 in MOCAK. Sport and its parallel cultural practices constitute an important aspect of today’s popular culture, which we could be observed during the media frenzy around Euro 2012 football championship organised in Poland and Ukraine. We decided to treat the exhibition as a pretext to discuss contemporary pop culture, giving the floor to its fans and its opponents. Our basic perspective, however, is the one proposed by British cultural studies, a research school born at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s in Birmingham, which provided a comprehensive and optimistic view of popular pleasures. Its theorists such as Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thomson and Raymond Williams valued popular culture for several reasons. First of all, they thought it was much more authentic than art with its institutional and hierarchical limitations. Secondly, popular culture is a spontaneous expression of the identity of social collectivities. Thirdly, popular culture is popular not because of the fact that as spectators or consumers we unintentionally absorb certain texts but, quite to the contrary, because we oppose them. Of course most popular artefacts are manufactured on an industrial scale to bring profit, but people are smart. They always try to find ways in which they can provide a popular item with an individual, personal dimension. Scholars point to several strategies that help us cope with the culture industry and enjoy its products. Such tactics consist in, for the most part, avoiding and omitting certain texts. We employ them, for instance, when we flick through TV channels to avoid commercials, when we visit a shopping mall and leave without buying anything (the kids who, much to the annoyance of guards, use malls like parks, are a model example of this tactic), or when we put on a casual sweatshirt instead of a smart suit even though the situation or profession suggest otherwise. Other strategies include textual poaching, when we capture fragments of texts selected against the intention of their authors. Popular culture is like a supermarket of meanings arrayed on shelves for shoppers to pick whatever catches their eye. We have an intuitive knowledge of popular genres; we know how to distinguish a soap opera from a talk show, a news programme from reality show etc. We also know the rules of the game and we can easily distance ourselves from popular forms.

Pleasure is one of the key issues in popular culture. We play our favourite PlayStation games, we read tabloids and books and buy new gadgets because it brings us satisfaction. The pleasure can spring from various sources. We may sympathise with Alexis from the Dynasty because she challenges the social status quo; we may savour the fall of aristocracy which sinks down with the Titanic; we may keep our fingers crossed for our favourite X-Factor contestant because for some reason with identify with them. Popular culture is about power. Ironically, the popular, mass culture is the easiest tool that helps us fight for our own empowerment. Pop culture illustrates power relations, which is why it is full of sexism, homophobia and other instances of prejudice. However, the most important thing that happens when we encounter pop culture is the fact that we can take over a ready-made format and change it into our own. Popular culture is a space within which we can deride all higher values and rules that allegedly characterise our civilisation: order, discipline, self-control. As the British school explains, these values serve only to maintain social divisions and interdependencies. Good taste and good breeding are just tools of control. Pop culture not only does not fall for such tricks but it also rejects them.

However, pleasure is not equal to thoughtlessness. Participation in popular culture requires quite some effort, not only because of the need to segregate and choose. It involves our cognitive processes and our emotions and requires a constant ability to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, like when we watch TV while responding to text messages, checking the e-mail, eating a sandwich and making tea on top of it. Just try to do all of this while visiting a museum to see, let’s say, Damien Hirst.

And what about art? It is apparently one of the contemporary arenas of struggle when it comes to defining the world. The intellectual left likes to enjoy this vision, usually perceiving itself as the avant-garde: this is why it has a soft spot for all kinds of artistry, especially theatre and performance. Nevertheless art, however interesting and provocative, serves for the most part its own self-esteem. Safe in its museums and galleries, it may say whatever it wants. From time to time, admittedly, it does seem to hold some vestiges of its previous symbolic power, but the popular dream which portrays art as a vehicle of social change is just an illusion; a Utopia created by the new bourgeoisie, with its characteristic lack of any self-distance and sense of humour. Better turn your TVs on or go on the internet – this is world the fate of the world is now being decided, and you have an important role to play.

Samuel Nowak (born 1984) – Ph. D. student at the Department of Audiovisual Media, Jagiellonian University. Specialises in British cultural studies, LGBT studies and media theory. A fellow of the Tokyo Foundation. Received grants from the Rector of the Jagiellonian University, Minister of Science and Higher Education and other scholarships. Studied and completed research internships at the Universiteit Antwerpen, King’s College London, New York University, Goldsmiths, University of London.