1. Home
2. Courses
3. Media Criticism
4. Quotations for Discussion Sessions
5. Module on Lipsitz

George Lipsitz, “Popular Culture: This Is Ain’t No Sideshow,” in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 3–20.

1. For some populations at some times, commercialized leisure is a history — a repository of collective memory that places immediate experience in the context of change over time. The very same media that trivialize and distort culture, that turn art into commodities, and that obscure the origins and intentions of artists also provide meaningful connection to our own pasts and to the past of others (5).
2. Yet it is also clear that what we call popular culture differs markedly in its aims and intentions from the Enlightenment culture of “beauty and truth” idealized in the nineteenth century by Matthew Arnold, as well as from the isolated ‘folk’ cultures studied by anthropologist and folklorists (13).
3. Like many popular music critics, television's detractors condemn the medium because they feel it debases an otherwise successfully functioning society. Without discounting the shallow vulgarity of the medium, it is important to note that television also reflects an already ongoing unraveling of social relations in society; its needy narcissism serves as a salve for the wounds of everyday life (19).
4. For all of their triviality and frivolity, the messages of popular culture circulate in a network of production and reception that is quite serious. At their worst, they perform the dirty work of the economy and the state. At their best, they retain memories of the past and contain hopes for the future that rebuke the injustices and inequities of the present (20).