An Uneasy Return to the Role of Popular Culture

The editorial for the thematic issue of <em>Media and Communication</em>, “From Sony’s Walkman to <em>RuPaul’s Drag Race</em>: A Landscape of Contemporary Popular Culture,” looks at the prevailing themes of earlier studies of popular culture, from Raymond Williams’ organic culture to the postmodern embrace of commodity culture, in relation to the current cultural moment of disruption and unease. The editorial then synthesizes the articles contained in the issue against where the study of popular culture has been and where we may anticipate it going.

Early Cinema, Process Films, and Screen Advertising

This chapter explores what early process films can tell us about advertising and the transformation of screen cultures. Starting with a detailed historical study of an exemplary process film, the chapter addresses a number of conceptual issues that resonate with takes on screen advertising suggested in the present book. A particular focus lies on screen advertising’s entanglement with entertainment culture, education, visual culture, and commodity culture. Questions of genre and aesthetics, in particular the colour aesthetics of process films in early cinema as well as their colonialist ideology, are also addressed. The chapter argues that screen advertising, despite its often-acknowledged ephemeral nature, is an utterly robust or persistent phenomenon – persistent in regard to the objects, screens, and practices of screen advertising.

Reading F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby through Aristotle’s Eyes: Friendship, Gifts, and Commodities

This research explores the interlocked notions of friendship, community, gift, and commodity culture in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It seeks to demonstrate that Fitzgerald’s ethical vision of friendship, community, the Bad, and the Good are deeply shaped by Aristotle’s works The Nicomachean Ethics, The Politics, and The Metaphysics. The extent to which Aristotle has shaped the form and contents of The Great Gatsby, a novel rightly described as a classic of its genre and how far the contentious aspect of its gendered and orientalized characterization can be traced to Fitzgerald’s dialogic relation with the Greek philosopher are among certain questions that this research addresses. The approach to the issue and the related questions stated above is eclectic. It draws its paradigms, partly from Bakhtin’s dialogical theory, partly from economic and cultural anthropology, and partly from postcolonial, historical theory of the type elaborated by Said and Fanon.

Rethinking museum shops in the context of the climate crisis

This paper critically evaluates the role of the museum shop in the context of the climate crisis. Specifically, it considers how museum shops might be reconceptualized as an important facet of visitor communication within the emerging category of climate museums. Theoretically, the paper references the conceptual linkages of material and commodity culture in relation to climate issues, while practically, it frames the shop as a space that can both support exhibition messaging and prompt behavioral changes among visitors that might help reduce their planetary impact. These claims are explored with reference to the concepts of “gestalt” and “nudge” theory. The paper presents three approaches for effecting such changes: 1. Extended exhibition messaging through shop products; 2. Consistency of tone between exhibition and shop spaces; 3. Imposing limits on the shop space to convey environmental messages. Ultimately, the paper argues for the shop as a more integral cultural component of the museum complex.

Reading F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby through Aristotle’s Eyes: Friendship, Gifts, and Commodities

This research explores the interlocked notions of friendship, community, gift, and commodity culture in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It seeks to demonstrate that Fitzgerald’s ethical vision of friendship, community, the Bad, and the Good are deeply shaped by Aristotle’s works The Nicomachean Ethics, The Politics, and The Metaphysics. The extent to which Aristotle has shaped the form and contents of The Great Gatsby, a novel rightly described as a classic of its genre and how far the contentious aspect of its gendered and orientalized characterization can be traced to Fitzgerald’s dialogic relation with the Greek philosopher are among certain questions that this research addresses. The approach to the issue and the related questions stated above is eclectic. It draws its paradigms, partly from Bakhtin’s dialogical theory, partly from economic and cultural anthropology, and partly from postcolonial, historical theory of the type elaborated by Said and Fanon.

3. Consuming culture

‘Consuming culture’ evaluates contemporary art’s relationship with consumerism and mass culture. The issue of art’s separation from or mergence with commodity culture has a long history. However, during the 1990s, there was an intensification of the forces involved, many of them old features of capitalism, which contributed to the dominance of a triumphant consumer culture not just over art but over all other cultural production. Branding, used by both artists and museums, is an important aspect of the consumer culture of art. In addition, the rise of social media has brought about a transforming, and intensely modernizing, turn, opening art up to quantifiable and manipulable instant feedback.

Beckett’s Queer Time of Défaillance: Ritual and Resistance in Happy Days

This chapter draws on Beckett’s Happy Days production notebooks to argue against critical assessments of Winnie as an exemplar of British pluck. Rather, the domestic rituals she performs serve to distract her from ever-encroaching entropy. Read in queer time, as chrononormative regulators, Winnie’s rituals are recast as coping mechanisms that help to normalise her abnormal situation. Happy Days thus challenges prevailing understandings of the politics of queer time, queer failure, and performance. Happy Days is read historically as a response to late capitalism’s regulatory regimes. Winnie’s queer experience of time is the audience’s, too, and her failures implicate them in their own attachments to deadening routine. Winnie’s performance of internalised discipline models (and critiques) how commodity culture deadens existence, but also how theatre as spectacle normalises suffering.