welcome to my brain

While thinking more about Bordieu's essay and our discussions in class, I have been asking myself this question:

Is the "intellectualism," or "elevated-ness" (not sure if those are even words, but you get my drift) of a piece of art determined by our perception of it?

In other words, could the way in which we consume a piece of art determine the high-ness of that art? I was kind of talking about this before in my Journey post, but I think I was talking more about how I was mad that some random rich people get to determine what good art is. This post is more about the idea that maybe the "good-ness" of a piece of art is determined by how we look at it.

Bordieu says that "a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded," and I think he's right about that. A person who grew up in a poor part of the inner-city probably has the cultural competence to decode a Lil' Wayne rap song, while a person who grew up in a mansion in an affluent area most likely would not have that same cultural competence, therefore, the Lil Wayne song means nothing to him.

That's not really my point, so let me start to make it. I think--and this is my opinion--that most college professors don't listen to rap music (at least, the rap music of today.) I have also heard many people say they don't think rap music is actually music (mostly rich, old white folks) and I don't think it's a stretch to say that most of the CEO's in the business world today probably don't listen to rap, either. To put it in Bordieu's words, rap music is widely considered to be "lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile," and not worth the time of those who can be "satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguishes pleasures forever closed to the profane."

But, if someone in the academic world decided to analyze a rap song to find out the cultural meaning, if they looked at it in an intellectual way, does that make the piece of work "refined?" I've heard of that before. Would that rap song then be considered a piece of high art, because it's been intellectually examined and analyzed?

More on this later!