Official culture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Official culture is the culture that receives social legitimation or institutional support in a given society. Official culture is usually identified with bourgeois culture. For revolutionary Guy Debord, official culture is a "rigged game" ("le jeu truqué de la culture officielle") , where conservative powers forbid subversive ideas to have direct access to the public discourse, and where such ideas are integrated only after being trivialized and sterilized. ("Report on the Construction of Situations")
A widespread observation is that a great talent has a free spirit. For instance Alexander Pushkin, which some scholars regard as Russia's first great writer, attracted the mad irritation of the Russian officialdom and particularly of the Tsar, since he
- "instead of being a good servant of the state in the rank and file of the administration and extolling conventional virtues in his vocational writings (if write he must), composed extremely arrogant and extremely independent and extremely wicked verse in which a dangerous freedom of thought was evident in the novelty of his versification, in the audacity of his sensual fancy, and in his propensity for making fun of major and minor tyrants." --Vladimir Nabokov (1981) Lectures on Russian Literature, lecture on Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers, pp.13-4
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Official art
Official art includes public art and monuments.
Art patronage
In European art, patrons have been the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages; the courts in the Renaissance and the bourgeoisie (the new middle class) in the Enlightenment era. During the 20th century private patrons were joined by state funded arts councils and museums.
Example: French revolution
Jacques-Louis David effectively became a 'dictator of the arts' under the French Republic and in the subsequent reign of Napoleon.
Official music
Unofficial culture: satire and the like
Satire, caricature, graffiti, guerilla art and street art are art forms that are in opposition of official culture, in other words anti-establishment.
See also
- Academic painting
- Arts and politics
- Arts council
- Art of the Third Reich
- Art world economics
- Artistic freedom
- Censorship
- Court painter
- Cultural heritage
- Cultural policy
- Degenerate art
- Dictator of the arts
- High culture
- Mainstream
- National symbol
- National Endowment for the Arts
- Officialdom
- Official history
- Patronage
- Public art and politics
- Public broadcasting
- Purpose of art
- Social realism
- Subsidy
- Spectacle (critical theory)
- War artist
Antonyms