It is customary to distinguish three types of culture: folk, elite and mass. Moreover, if the folk culture was formed directly in the national environment, and the mass culture is understandable and accessible to the broad masses of people, then the elite culture is created and consumed only by a narrow circle of the elite. Her language is usually difficult for an untrained person to understand.
Instructions
Step 1
Elite culture includes works of different types of art: literature, music, painting, theater, cinema, etc. Since her understanding requires a certain level of training, she has a very narrow circle of connoisseurs. Not everyone understands the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Alexander Sokurov. A special type of thinking is required to understand the works of Franz Kafka or James Joyce's novel Ulysses. The creators of elite culture, as a rule, do not try to achieve high fees. Creative self-realization is much more valuable to them.
Step 2
The consumers of the elite culture are people with a high educational level and developed aesthetic taste. Many of them are themselves art creators or professional researchers. First of all, we are talking about writers, artists, musicians, art historians, literary and art critics. This circle also includes connoisseurs and connoisseurs of art, regular visitors to museums, theaters and concert halls.
Step 3
Moreover, works of the same types of art can belong to both elite and popular culture. For example, classical music belongs to the elite culture, and popular music belongs to the mass culture, Tarkovsky's films to the elite culture, and Indian melodramas to the mass culture, etc. At the same time, there are literary genres that always belong to mass culture and are unlikely to ever become elitist. Among them are detective stories, novels for women, humorous stories and feuilletons.
Step 4
Sometimes there are curious examples of how works related to elite culture can, under certain conditions, go into the category of mass. For example, Bach's music is undoubtedly a phenomenon of elite culture, but if it is used as a musical accompaniment to a figure skating program, it automatically turns into a product of mass culture. Or a completely opposite example: many of Mozart's works for their time were, most likely, "light music" (that is, they could be attributed to mass culture). And now they are perceived, rather, as belonging to the elite.
Step 5
Most of the works of elite culture are initially avant-garde or experimental. They use artistic means that will become clear to the mass consciousness after several decades. Sometimes experts even call the exact term - 50 years. In other words, examples of elite culture are half a century ahead of their time.
