The creation of amusement
Cooper notes that the Greeks did not genuinely have "art" when Plato spoke about the impacts of culture:
We may find it astounding that the Greeks, who were known for their artistic sensibilities, had no word even vaguely similar to our term "art." The closest was techne, but this encompassed many other trades and abilities as well, such as soldiering and riding (Cooper, 1997, p. 9).
In actuality, it wasn't until the latter half of the eighteenth century that Western nations began to distinguish between art and entertainment as distinct types of culture.Prior to this, people from different social classes shared cultural resources (Levine, 1988, p. 83). For instance, Shakespeare was portrayed as popular entertainment that introduced flying witches and songs. However, starting in the late 1700s, cultural elites made a conscious effort to distinguish their own cultural consumption from that of the general public, leading to the introduction of the dichotomy between "art" and "entertainment."
Of fact, there were earlier cultural forms that contained components that we would consider amusing, such as folk culture (Storey, 2003). However, at that time, the concept of a distinct cultural genre that exists independently of other cultural genres with artistic or educational purposes and whose primary goal is amusement did not yet exist in its current form. These new categories began to emerge in the later half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, in part because a reaction to the once rural inhabitants' industrialization and urbanization (Cunningham, 2014, p. 7)."In those societies that made the transition from feudalism to capitalism," culture became commercialized. Beginning in the early 20th century, mature industrial cultures saw an increase in this commercialization (Hesmondhalgh & Pratt, 2005, p. 2). According to Ohmann (Ohmann, 1996, p. 20), entertainment was a "phenomenon of the city" and specifically a phenomenon of the urban working class (see also Peiss, 1986). In contrast to rural civilizations where peasants toiled until dusk and rose with the sun, the mechanization of time in With regard to leisure time, as opposed to working time, urban industrialization opened up the prospect of a new experience category that might be filled with "diversions" (Cunningham, 2014, p. 21). Despite this promise, early industrialization actually left little time for leisure because people spent fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, in factories. However, labor unions and social reformers' initiatives resulted in a reduced workweek and the opening of working people's leisure time (Kelly, 1996, pp. 152-153). The aristocrats, who were considered a "leisure class" (Veblen, 2007 [1899]), were exempt from labor requirements, while the developing classes of industrialized workers had to manage their schedules to balance work and leisure. The enormous social and cultural shifts that followed paved the way for the rise of the entertainment industry as they exist now. Walter Kendrick contends that in order for a certain kind of entertainment to exist, there must first be a consistent audience that wishes to consume a particular kind of culture, such as a "market for fiction." Kendrick, 1991, p. 33, traces the emergence of a category he names "scary entertainment" (gothic novels, which he claims then evolved into horror films) over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Richard Ohmann's history of the rise of popular periodicals and newspapers, entertainment and its audience were mutually constitutive:
Benjamin Day, a composer, came up with the concept of publishing his New York Sun for a cent in 1833. These documents transformed the industry and brought together a new readership (Ohmann, 1996, p. 20)
Ohmann argues that entertainment ‘entrepreneurs’ like magazine publisher Frank Munseyin the nineteenth century‘hit upon a formula of elegant simplicity: identify a large audience that is not hereditarily affluent or elite, but that is getting on well enough and that has cultural aspirations, [and] give it what it wants’ (Ohmann, 1996, p. 25). Ohmann also argues that this shared culture then helps to create a community, by giving them something in common. The shared consumption of entertainment becomes a common element of a group – an audience – who might not otherwise share a background or everyday practices.
New approaches to understanding and structuring culture were required, in addition to audiences. As Kendrick puts it:
When publishers (or film studios) can rely on steady demand for a largely consistent output, that is when a genre truly emerges (Kendrick, 1991, p. 77).
He observes that the entertainment business had reached a phase that we, as late as the twentieth century, may recognize when writing about sensational theater in the nineteenth century. For the first time, it had evolved into an industry in the contemporary sense. the crazily busy, perpetually inventive goons of early nineteenth-century theater took hold of whatever that was selling, replicated it until it was no longer selling, and then moved on. A lot of playwrights produced a ton of work. For example, between 1831 and 1857, George Dibdin Pitt is credited with creating about 140 plays, melodramas, farces, burlesques, and pantomimes (Kendrick, 1991, p. 119)
Since entertainment is a business and is therefore created to satisfy the needs of big audiences, at least "until it stopped selling," all of these components of entertainment as a cultural system come from this. The industries that would create and distribute entertainment may expand as consumers and genres developed.
Simultaneously, and Levine argues not by accident, the educated strata in society started to isolate their cultural consumption from the general public. Shakespeare was seen as a member of the same community as magicians, dancers, singers, acrobats, minstrels, and comedy before the nineteenth century. He was promoted in the same spirit and featured on the same playbills (Levine, 1988, p. 23). However, cultural elites began a process of "sacralization" (Levine, 1988, p. 132) in the course of the nineteenth century, transforming Shakespeare from a popular culture into "a new literary religion" (Richard Grant White, quoted in Levine, 1988, p. 70), appropriate only for a "exclusive" audience and not for the "great popular masses" (New York Herald, quoted in Levine, 1988, p. 66). Shakespeare's plays were made into works of art by their difficulty. Shakespeare's plays might be presented in a style that was enjoyable, enjoyable, and accessible in earlier ages. "Some of the alterations bordered on the spectacular, such as the flying, singing witches in Macbeth," according to Levine (1988, p. 42), when Shakespeare was presented as entertainment. An impresario "crafted a felicitous conclusion for [King Lear]"… An affair that Edgar was having with Lear and Cordelia were permitted to live (Levine, 1988, p. 44). But as Shakespeare's writing became more and more revered, the new cultural priests argued that: Shakespeare was just too complicated for uninformed minds, thus he had to be restricted to specific theaters that catered to a specific audience. The author of "Why Shakespeare Is Not Understood" in World's Work [in 1903] began by claiming that "not one in ten thousand of us can really read common passages of Shakspere [sic] intelligently." (cited on page 71 of Levine, 1988)
Shakespeare's works were now seen as being so challenging that comprehension required training:
'The only edition produced that delivers' was how the University Society marketed their thirteen-volume New International Shakespeare in 1903. two comprehensive sets of notes: critical notes for the critical student or scholar, and explanatory notes for the general reader. Shakespeare "shows the way to the higher intellectual and moral life - more clearly than any other author" (Levine, 1988, p. 72)
Shakespeare had therefore been transformed by the beginning of the twentieth century from a popular playwright whose tragedies belonged to those who gathered to see them into a holy author who needed to be shielded from gullible audiences (Levine, 1988, p. 72).
Of course, the gullible audiences might still wish to read Shakespeare for amusement purposes only. However, the new aesthetic systems demonstrated that this was an incorrect method of appreciating art. Critic A. A. Lipscomb declared in 1882 that "to know Shakespeare's "special worth" necessitated "rigid mechanical training," without which "Shakespeare is not very useful." (Page 73 of Levine, 1988). All of this was much different in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when illiterate audiences could enjoy an evening of filthy songs, acrobats, and Shakespearean scenes played for their boisterous, good-humored amusement.
Similar efforts were made to make opera and symphonic music appropriate exclusively for the most well-educated segments of society. Thus, two major cultural streams emerged during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the one hand, art was supposed to be demanding, hard, and appropriate consumption only through education and reverence. "The better class, the most refined and intelligent of our citizens" should be the only ones with access to it. The pure, virtuous, and high-minded (Thomas Whitney Surette, quoted in Levine, 1988, p. 101). However, entertainment remained accessible to the general public. The battle to "establish aesthetic standards, to separate true art from the purely vulgar" and the upper class from the burgeoning middle classes was at the heart of the "sacralization" process (Levine, 1988, p. 128).
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that, despite the fact that, as I mentioned in the Introduction, there are records of philosophers discussing the impact of culture dating back to the Ancient Greeks, contemporary aesthetics—and the term itself—does not come into being until the eighteenth century. Cooper points out that philosophers have only considered the numerous issues that can be presented in the modern era. regarding a wide range of topics, including art, beauty, creativity, imagination, expressiveness, and much more (Cooper, 1997, p. 9).
The German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten is credited with coining the term "aesthetics" in the middle of the eighteenth century. (Page 1 of Cooper, 1997). Furthermore, Kant's work, particularly his 1790 publication Critique of Judgement, is widely cited as the foundation of the contemporary tradition of aesthetic philosophy (Cooper, 1997, p. 2). The process of creating the category of art itself included the formation of aesthetics, a philosophy of art.
In Western societies of the twenty-first century, the terms "art" and "entertainment" continue to have significance and describe different facets of culture. Of course, one could contend that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a work of art. (Pateman, 2006) or that opera is entertainment (Donohue, 2010), and these interpretations are relevant since the concepts are sufficiently ambiguous. The binary has never been straightforward, and it has undergone several modifications in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These include inquiries into cultural omnivorousness as a signifier of cultural capital (Warde, Wright, & Gayo-Cal, 2007) and the rise of postmodern theories of culture (Jameson, 1991) and artistic practices (Indiana, 2010). However, the line that separates art from amusement continues to play a significant role in the creation and dissemination of culture. Scheff and Kotler (1996) contend that the basic orientation and business strategy are determined by one's allegiance to either side of the low vs high culture paradigm. artistic organizations' performances. Additionally, in the regular cultural practice The differentiation is made as a continuous procedure. Here are a few samples taken at random from recent newspaper reviews: "Love Never Dies's value as sumptuous old-fashioned entertainment more than makes up for its shortcomings as art." "These stories... might not qualify as art, but they sell," writes Blake (2012) on page 10. Extremely nicely... Although her stories don't necessarily transform lives or leave a lasting impression, they do provide enjoyable diversion for a few hours. "High literature it is not, but... the characters are distinct, the pace is demanding, and the ideas are audacious" (Morris, 2012, p. 30); (Goldsworthy, 2012, p. 34). Additionally, cultural critics insist on a traditional aesthetic value in ordinary discourse. Art ought to be difficult because For instance, according to artist Anselm Kiefer (cited in Needham, 2011), "art is difficult, it's not entertainment" (Brody, 2014). The tone ought to be "serious" (Bradshaw, 2010). It most definitely shouldn't be "easy" to access (Roper, 1978, p. 86).
However, the aesthetics of entertainment place a far different weight on cultural attributes. The forms that entertainment has taken over the past 200 years have remained remarkably stable, despite the false claims of some philosophers who argue that there have been radical changes in the field, such as the rise of the society of the spectacle (Debord, 1977), postmodernism (Jameson, 1991), or an acceleration of cultural change. Many traits in the aesthetics of entertainment can be found by studying its past. These traits include amusement throughout this time. Good entertainment is indecent. It tells a tale. It is valued when something is serial. Good stories always have happy endings. It's fast, loud, participatory, and amazing. The customer experiences a powerful emotional reaction to it. Additionally, enjoyable amusement is fundamental to the goal of this work. The remainder of this chapter delves into each of these qualities and clarifies why enjoyment has taken center stage in my book's argument.
In scholarly and critical writing about culture, these attributes of effective entertainment typically only show up as a deficiency—a failure to qualify as successful art. However, entertainment actually possesses a cohesive, admirable aesthetic all by itself. Amusement is more than just a bad artistic endeavor; it has its own system of values. Recognizing that an aesthetic system is not a computer program is also crucial. You might be thinking of a favorite entertainment product while you read this chapter; if you compare it to all the qualities listed, you might discover that it falls short in some areas. That's exactly right. Particular examples of prosperous Not every component of an aesthetic system may be equally displayed in culture. A long time ago would have passed if it were feasible to simply program a machine to have these qualities and provide amazing entertainment. However, creating quality entertainment is never a mechanical process. It is invariably inspired, human, and creative.
Crudeness
Amusement is vile. This holds true for all forms of entertainment, not just "adult entertainment." This is accurate in two ways. First of all, it is accurate in the strict sense, as the OED defines vulgar as "of or pertaining to the common people." However, it is also accurate in the usual sense of vulgar, which is derogatory (which, surprisingly, also literally means "lacking in knowledge or book learning").
There has always been entertainment, since its vulgar's birth as a separate cultural genre. "Every program had its bawdy or "purple" acts" in American saloons throughout the 1870s and 1880s (Nasaw, 1993, p. 14). With the early popularity of phonographs in public spaces (early jukeboxes),
Executives at phonograph companies were shocked to learn that "unscrupulous" exhibitors were recording, gathering, and trading tapes of... lewd exchanges and made-up encounters (Nasaw, 1993, p. 125).
The development of moving pictures followed a similar path. The short films "How Girls Go to Bed" and "How Girls Undress" were the first hits on the "Mutoscope," a moving picture system "designed as a business machine for traveling salesmen to exhibit their wares," in the 1880s (Nasaw, 1993, p. 133).
Entertainment vulgarity has long upset moral (middle-class) The "social leaders" (Nasaw, 1993, p. 106) and the "gentle reformers" (Peiss, 1986, p. 63) are the guardians of the day. When 200 "juveniles" were listening to a comedic singer in a music hall in 1851, the English social reformer Henry Mayhew was horrified by what he witnessed: [at] the mere utterance of some filthy term at the end of each stanza. The girls shrieked with pleasure, while the boys stomped their feet with delight. It was absolutely horrifying to witness the delight with which the little ones sprang to the horrible meaning of the words, despite the extreme inventiveness that had been used to prevent an offensive thought from passing by (cited in Bailey, 1998, p. 136). Moralists were horrified by the risqué songs of Marie Lloyd in the 1890s. In: "Now That I've Asked Johnny Jones, I Know!" Clothed as a schoolgirl, Lloyd persistently badgers her parents for explanations regarding some intriguing events that escape her immediate comprehension, such as her father being harassed. "What's that for, eh?" she asks in the tagline, only to have her astute schoolboy buddy Johnny Jones satisfy her. "so I understand now" The songs that continued to glorify alcohol as well as "objectionable songs... that advertise another trade" upset the reputable music press. Bailey (1998), page 155.
Moreover, early in the 20th century, reformers were horrified by the wide variety of vulgarity present at working-class dances and went there as entertainment. In 1919: A reformer went to a dance.
There were perhaps fifty young couples dancing, males and girls in their tweens and teen years. The majority of them were misbehaving, smoking cigarettes, using foul language, and shimmying while dancing. Young men and girls congregate here specifically to pick each other up (cited in Peiss, 1986, p. 183)
Entertainment is vulgar, and it always has been, as a unique cultural genre. From the perspective of entertainment aesthetics, this is a worthwhile and beneficial thing.
Narrative
A "story" is a sequence of events connected by people with believable psychologies that occur in a cause-and-effect manner. It is essential to creating entertaining content that is successful. This is true for a variety of media, not only the more obvious ones like pop songs, popular dance, and music events, but also more obvious media like newspapers, magazines, films, and television where it is essential to take viewers on a journey. It's evident from watching American Idol or America's Next Top Model that the best compliment a young aspirant can receive is that their performance "told a story." Everything must "serve the story," from lighting to camerawork to costume design to visual effects, according to creative staff members active in entertainment theater, television, and cinema. "What are the keys to a successful sound design?" The first tip, according to Avatar's sound designer Christopher Boyes, is to "think like a storyteller." Recognize the narrative.' (Boyes, 2010, p. 138). "What's the key to crafting a convincing future vision?" The approach is to "immerse the audience in the story," according to Minority Report production designer Alex McDowell (McDowell, 2010, p. 139). "How does great science fiction design happen?" Doctor Who concept artist Peter McKinstry says you have to:
Instead of detracting from the narrative, let the design tell it and support it. Take a look at the opening scene of Star Wars. A larger, more menacing-looking ship is pursuing a smaller, battered spacecraft. In those initial few frames, you have all the information you need to grasp the plot. (Page 118 of McKinstry, 2010)
The story's essential components have unchanged in terms of entertainment. Stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as those by John Buchan, Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, and Arthur Conan Doyle, have remained virtually untouched into the twenty-first century.
As previously mentioned, the aesthetics of amusement have frequently been reduced to a deficiency in academic writing. The art of telling a compelling story is highly valued in academic writing, but there is a dearth of study on the subject. In fact, modernist descriptions that consciously ignore narrative as an aesthetic element are more common in academic writing (Sheehan, 2002). However, a good aspect of entertainment aesthetics is narrative.
Sequential Nature
The first Sherlock Holmes story was released in 1887. An further 59 had been released by 1927. all with the same characters dealing with comparable issues in comparable narrative frameworks. One important artistic quality of entertainment is seriality, which is the use of the same characters, circumstances, and structures in numerous publications.Occasionally, this consists of a single narrative that is serialized over several episodes, connected by "cliffhangers" that compel viewers to watch on. One candidate for the earliest comic book series is The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, which was originally published in English in 1842 and tells the humorous tale of the escapades of an exceptionally unfortunate and ugly romantic suitor. Twenty episodes of the heroine's daring adventures were shown to viewers in The Perils of Pauline. 1914.Entertainment occasionally offers a sequence of stand-alone stories within the same diegetic universe. In Britain's Old Mother Riley films from the 1930s and 1940s, comedian Arthur Luncan performed in sixteen different roles, sometimes appearing in two a year (Hoggart, 1998 [1957], p. 260). For as long as seriality has been a recognized genre in media, including soap operas, radio crime shows, and story papers, it has played a crucial role in providing entertainment. This creates a unique set of obstacles for entertainment: returning to the same locations while coming up with fresh concepts, viewpoints, and tales to tell. However, it also has unique benefits, such as allowing viewers to get to know people better and observe how they act in a greater variety of scenarios than is feasible in any alternative configuration.
Joyful conclusions
Throughout history, happy endings have been a staple of entertainment. During the first ten years of the twentieth century, in the kinescopes:
The cinematic melodramas featured virtuous protagonists and cunning antagonists, pursuits, striking finales or moments of fame (which might be promoted on the lithographed billboards outside), and typically concluded happily (Nasaw, 1993, p. 167)
This is frequently the case both literally and figuratively. A satisfactory resolution is valued in entertainment, which is related to the significance of story. The story must feel finished, not necessarily in the sense that the original state of affairs is restored, but rather in the sense that all of the major issues raised have been satisfactorily resolved. Keys are rarely left unlocked in entertainment mysteries for the viewer to solve, which is how entertainment customers prefer their entertainment. Although there might still be some ambivalence in some areas, the general enjoyment of the story will be felt upon its conclusion. Products for entertainment don't just stop. They are not constructed around theoretical, abstract frameworks. The novel takes set in a world where certain positive qualities exist, such as hope, friendship, joy, or love, even though the finale is depressing. According to Leavis (1968 [1932], p. 193, popular novels published in the early half of the twentieth century provided "assurances of everything turning out well." Nihilism and misanthropy are not typically valued in entertainment. Audience engagement is a prerequisite for entertainment. At the opera, you are expected to sit quietly and respectfully; at the heavy metal performance, you are expected to yell, scream, and wildly wave your head. According to Lawrence Levine's cultural history, the main differentiation between amusement and high culture is as follows:
The rituals surrounding the appreciation of high culture were invented in the late nineteenth century, as was the delusion that the artistic creations of high culture were originally intended to be regarded with the reverent, disciplined seriousness that Americans were trained to observe in the late nineteenth century (Levine, 1988, p. 229).
The intake of entertainment is not regarded with much reverence. Early in the nineteenth century, when Shakespeare was performed for an audience:
theater groups featured scenes from Shakespeare's plays as well as comedies, minstrel shows, singing, and other acts. The integrity of the artwork was not given much weight; scenes and parts could be included or excluded based on the preferences of the producers or the needs of the viewers. The latter were demanding and overbearing, applauding and jeering, yelling at performers, and participating in musicals. Sorting and segmentation separated popular amusement from the arts by the end of the 19th century. Highbrow performance audiences grew reserved; patrons of the new museums avoided spitting on the floor, brought young children and pets, and maintained a respectful silence (Ohmann, 1996, pp. 158–159).
The French words entre (together) and tenir (to hold) are the origin of the English word "entertainment." together or cooperatively. A relationship between the creator and the audience is necessary for entertainment, by definition. Art does not necessarily need to be eaten, but entertainment must. Entertainment is merely defined as something that amuses a crowd.
nice
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