Trendsetting...

Just last week I read an article in Elle Magazine (guilty pleasure) that highlighted renowned high fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg’s new jewelry collection, inspired by a Latin dance troupe. I found this concept interesting: dance inspiring jewelry: gold, woven, elaborately diamonded. Seemingly, the path of fashion trickles down from the “highs” to the “lows,” from those who can afford Rodeo Drive and Diane von Furstenberg to those who are lucky to afford to purchase fashion knockoffs (me). But aren’t their other times when the low culture, or popular culture, climbs the ladder on to the high? What about trends like grunge wear appearing back on the catwalks in the last season?
Following our reading from Art and its Public, I seem to be on a long, thoughtful quest to discover my position on the topic of “high” and “low” culture and the semantics question as to whether it is even possible to distinguish between the two. While trying to discover the trend among curators and how museums handle the purported divide, I came across several reviews for a 1990 exhibit at MoMA titled “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture”? (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,971450-1,00.html) According to the reviews, the critics completely balked at the display for two reasons: one, placing “low” art alongside “high” art (perhaps because this blurred distinctions?) and two, exhibiting “low” art in an “elitist” institution like MoMA. Now my question is why have we, as students of and professionals in museums, returned to this question of categorizing high and low culture, and their differences and similarities, almost twenty years later? Even each of the authors of the first three chapters of Art and its Public brought up the topic. As I mentioned in my previous post, the Tate Modern will be exhibiting a show that seems so similar to the 1990 MoMA show, but do I think the Tate Modern will be forced to stare down the same type of criticism? Certainly not if I take our readings in AMUS in to account…