Short description
The intellectual and the popular: Irving Howe and John Waters, Susan Sontag and Ethel Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald and Bill Cosby, Amiri Baraka and Mick Jagger, Andrea Dworkin and Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and Lenny Bruce. All feature in Andrew Ross's lively history and critique of modern American culture. Andrew Ross examines how and why the cultural authority of modern intellectuals is bound up with the changing face of popular taste in America. He argues that the making of "taste" is hardly an aesthetic activity, but rather an exercise in cultural power, policing and carefully redefining social relations between classes.
Long description
Disrespect/hostility, paternalism/deference, elitism/populism, authority/delinquency - these are some of the features that characterise the historically fraught relationship between intellectuals and popular culture. In arguing that these features are inherently linked, No Respect shows how and why the cultural authority of modern intellectuals is mutually bound up with the changing face of popular taste in America over the past fifty years. Far from an aesthetic activity, 'taste' is seen as an exercise in cultural power which serves to police and to redefine the social relations between 'educated' and 'ordinary' people. Categories of taste like hip, camp, kitsch, sick and midcult are analyzed through examples drawn from bebop jazz, soul music, drag shows, 'bad' films, performance comedy, TV quiz shows, spy fiction, women's pornography, and the 'people's culture' of the popular front.