Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 34

opera companies have been incorporating musicals with operatic scores
into their programming. The prestigious Glimmerglass Festival in New York,
for example, features Oklahoma! in its ���� season, which follows previous
stagings of Carousel, Camelot, and The Music Man earlier this decade. These
musicals’ operatic styles expose historical conflations between high and
low—often a result of influence between styles and artists—at a time
when opera, as an elite cultural institution in the United States, has had to
refigure how it attracts new audiences to sustain the art form. But despite
some similarities between opera and operatic musicals, the former still
retains its rarefied reputation, most likely a result of its unpopularity in the
United States. In a report on national arts participation in ����, the National
Endowment for the Arts (����) found that only �.�% of Americans had
attended an opera performance that year, making opera the least popular
art form that American adults either performed, practiced or shared socially.
The simulcasts of Metropolitan Opera performances in movie theaters
across the United States demonstrate that the distinctions between high
and low can act more like a spectrum than a binary, if not a Penrose triangle.
The Met simulcasts purposefully intersect traditional culture and film,
which originated as an art form from twentieth century popular culture,
to broaden opera’s popularity. But to focus on the two concepts exclusively
ignores the cultural middle ground. To understand middlebrow taste, a
term that originated in pre-World War I United States (Collini ����), is to
understand how the traditional and popular are situated in relation to the
middle. That there can be middlebrow drama, literature, painting, and music
demonstrates that the difference between high, low, and middle is not about
form, but primarily a distinction of aesthetics.
Aesthetics and aesthetic theory make art into an abstraction of taste. While
theory and abstractions are not always conducive to understanding the
practical—such as a festival—there is value to using aesthetics to understand
the significance of the moment of engagement between the individual
and artwork. Aesthetics help explain how low culture emanates from the
popular, but also the intellectual and spiritual fulfillment that comes from
participation in high culture. The power of the latter demonstrates why high
art should not be viewed as an exercise in elitism, but embraced as a key to
the positive experience of cultivating the mind. This byproduct is the value
of high art—and aesthetics helps show how the individual relates to it.
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