Old Specification - A2 Sample essays

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On the page below I had intended to give you examples of essays from different parts of the Module 5 and Module 6 paper with some marks and guidance on how these marks were awarded. However, I have decided to just post one sample essay. If you would like more examples, the deal is that you join the social networking site attached to this website and contribute a resource to it - a powerpoint, a video or an article you have spotted, that other teachers could use. Once I have seen that, if you email me I will send you more sample essays to use with your students - share and share alike!

Be aware students - your teachers know this sample essay is here and will know if you copy it! Sample essays are intended to give you some idea what sort of information to include and what sort of thing will be rewarded.

Module 5 Section A - Sample Response

It has been argued that high culture is difficult, demanding and rewarding whilst popular culture is easy, undemanding and superficial. Using examples discuss the validity of making distinctions like these between high culture and popular culture.

Discuss the validity of making distinctions like these between high and popular culture.

To understand whether it’s valid to distinct between high and low culture, we must first understand the difference between the two.

High culture is said to be inaccessible, entropic and difficult. Meaning that it is for the well educated and for the few. It produces one off pieces that are more un-commercial and are only produced and created by people who have been educated and trained to do so, for example a painting by Van Gough, a painter who was educated, suffered mayoralty?? through his life, and achieved no success until years after his death. High culture takes a deal of effort to be involved with and you must react and be fully involved with it to completely understand it and gain it true worth not necessarily understanding on first look. An example of something which would be high culture and difficult would be opera because everyone involved is educated, i.e. trained singers, musicians who have been to music college ect. They are also often done in an other language, often Italian, which again limits who can watch it creating a niece niche audience. This is a good explanation of high culture (careful with spelling – if you are not sure, use another word.)

Low/popular culture is said to be mass produced and can be created by anyone. It is redundant and requires little interaction to understand its meaning and is therefore clearly spelt out, which suits a lot of today’s modern people as they want to use culture as a way of relaxing them not having to require more energy to work out the complex, layered meanings. Pieces of low/popular culture are not one off’s but produced to the demand needed for the mass audience. Low/popular culture is said to be superficial, so no complex meaning or underlying plot, but one layer understood by the masses. Something which is superficial and redundant entails spoon-fed information often relayed via images which requires no effort from the audience, and an un-complex meaning is produced with no depth. Excellent explanation

An example of an artist who has been described as low culture would be Banksy. He is a new age modern, young artist, who has sold thousands of copies, making him a very popular artist which in turn makes money, and high culture people see him as a copy as he takes old classic pictures, buildings and sculptures and gives them a modern controversial twist. The high culture art world won’t accept him as a valid artist firstly because they see him as a copy and secondly because he is popular with a lot of people and has made money from this, resulting in celebrity, and high culture people don’t agree with making money from art and being successful, art should be a hard work with the only reward being what you produce. Yes, exactly

It is the upper classes who often decide what category a play, painting or person has to fit into, whether it be the high or low culture band, this results in the high culture putting the things they are into and respect as high culture and anything else which they disagree with or don’t appreciate, doubt less of it quality being branded as low culture. Post- modernists disagree with this theory and believe to produce the best, a mix of different ages, genres and cultures should be used.

An example of this argument of putting things into specific camps which can’t be mixed it the modern remake of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet was a play originally written by a highly considered play write, although he was only majorly credited and accepted by the high culture after he was dead, which backs up the there view of non-success or money making. His plays are mainly watched by the upper classes and considered as high culture, due to their now, complex language and in-depth plots with many under lying meaning. Shakespeare’s plays are performed in theatre and done by trained actors, which require concentration and interaction.

So when then it was made into the modern more up to date version for the big screen, high culture people saw this as a major dumbing down, using visual image to back up the words to convey the meaning to a universal audience allowing all to watch Shakespeare, taking away the niece niche audience factor from the high culture and making it accessible to the mass audience. This resulted in the film making lots of money because of its popularity, another disagreement with high culture, as they believe that the play should be valued for the intellectuality and quality not on how much it makes at the box office.

The remake of the film comes across in a post-modernistic point of view, keeping the language used in the original but mixing it with modern music, settings and a variety of other film themes and genres , e.g. western, which is partly mocked using the immediately recognised, stereotypical music and cow boy boots, making the message easy. The film begins with the opening titles being sequences as a modern day news flash, mixing in the modern elements, instead of the traditional monologue, usually performed at the beginning of the play. This can be seen as a major dumbing down of the whole plays plots as in the news feed it shows visual images of the whole story before it has even began, allowing the audience to have more than one chance at understanding it, reducing the amount of interaction needed to understand the film, making it easy and redundant, taking away one of the major things which symbolizes Shakespeare’s plays which are the difficult plot with many levels, dumbing it down to a very superficial level.

Another element of the film which is adapted to fit the modern market is the overall view of youth culture. In the scene where the party takes place, the original magic and fairies which would have been used for entertainment, alcohol and drugs replace is, trying to mimic today’s youth. From a high culture perspective it is destroying the original by changing where it is set and connotations it holds, promoting bad behaviour and drugs, abusing the films message of love conquering all. An additional point where the film is changed is the priest wearing a Hawaiian shirt underneath the traditional priest wear, making a mockery of religion and bringing in a commercial element of profit, and holidays, defacing the serious subject of religion, removing the complex difficult element of religion which runs through the whole of the original play.

The music is also changed quite significantly from the original, where they use generic hybridising to breakdown the boundaries between genres, using modern pop, western and dance music to denote what is happening or about to. So not only is the information fed by images it is also relayed by music, making it even easier to understand, making the audience bigger and it being more and more effortless and uncomplicated to its audiences.

Another key symbol which is used in the film is the ‘amour’ sign mimicking the coke cola signs which are recognised anywhere in the world, as a back drop to one of the scenes. This is very post modernistic element as it is mixing the actual words meaning of universal love, with the advertisement of a well known American brand and promoting their values. The company uses this as a way of capitalizing off the back of the film which high culture see as defacing, as they are using a well respected play for self profit, which defiantly shows the way of today’s world where anything is marketed and striped of any worth for what someone can gain for themselves. This may be seen by high culture as very kitsch in a negative way, but by popular culture as an extremely cleaver marketing ploy. Well made point.

A further example of the clear divide of what can be considered high or low and the criteria it must fit into is Vettriano and Hopper. These two artists work are very similar but only one is credited by the art world. Hopper is highly considered and his work seen as high quality because he was professionally trained, had no success until after he was dead, and sold minimum copies, also suffering for his art. On the other hand Vettriano who is also an amazing artist is not considered because he is very successful and has sold multiple copies along with not being educated in his trade. For this reason in the remake of Romeo and Juliet, they depict one of his well known pictures in the film. Again mixing things from different place to gain a broad outlook and push the high cultures strict boundaries of what is considered acceptable.

Another example of where disagreement lies is in a things worth, are the Harry Potter books. Some see them as an imaginative success which can appeal to all ages and cultures, but others see it as very simple, containing only a single layer of meaning suited to today’s un-imaginative culture, the same camps which emerge over the quality of the Romeo and Juliet remake.

But what must be considered is who gets the huge decision of deciding something’s quality or worth, and how do you measure the worth of something? The decision is often made by high cultured people because of the historical factor and if someone doesn’t understand a technical piece of art or extensive opera it does not mean anything which they appreciate is immediately popular, easy and superficial. I agree. But this is how many high culture people want things to pan out; as it means that they remain separate and only accessible to an exclusive few, them deciding the criteria for things to abide by. Even if something is successful or mass produced it can still carry a great deal of worth, and everyone deserves to have a chance to appreciate the difficult and simple even if the difficult has to be portrayed in a broken down way to fit today’s market.

The postmodernist perspective questions why things need to be grouped into high or low culture and can’t just be valued individually and respected for what it is. I agree with this perspective in the way that to create the best, inspiration needs to be drawn from all places which is exactly what this film does mixing the best from the various ages and using the music, architecture, language and art from our heritage, allowing it to be shown to a mass audience, as popularity and mass sales means its good not bad, although if something isn’t appreciated by all its still riteright for that small niece niche group to interpret it in there way as that is also their choice. To conclude, from all the examples I have looked into I see no point in grouping things into the two very specific and divided camps, but allowing things to group for themselves on what ever and whoever wishes to be involved in something, this allows things to move around and shift, being admired by all and if some things have to be dumbed down for the mass audience then so be it, as culture must move with the times as culture is who and what is around, beliefs, traditions ect, so things are better to be adapted than forgot and uneducated about all together.

This is really excellent work, especially for a first piece of work.

A01 7 Very good grasp of key language and Module 2 terminology used well and appropriately – you have made the transition from last year to this A2 work very well.

A03 14 You show a thorough understanding of both popular and high culture in the context of the question. Examples were apposite and illuminating with a clear links to conceptual points or ideas. You demonstrate a very good understanding of the debate, making points on both sides of the argument. You lost sight of the terms of the question a little bit – difficult, demanding, easy, superficial. However, your essay is implicitly addressing these
issues.

21/30 B+

Sample Essay Outline (courtesy of Richard)

‘Differences between popular and high culture can be explained purely in terms of money and technology.  Popular culture requires substantial investment in, for example, sophisticated recording and broadcasting equipment, as well as the high wages of celebrities.  High culture , in contrast, is ‘low tech’, with much more emphasis on individual creativity and small-scale distribution networks.’

Critically examine this argument and explore alternative views of the differences between high culture and popular culture.

1. Define high and popular culture. ‘the best that has been thought and known’ Matthew Arnold in ‘Culture and Anarchy’.  For him culture was a civilising influence.  It represented tradition.  It gave people standards.  We understand high culture as meaning ballet, opera, classical music, theatre, art in galleries, sculpture, the classics, the output of Radio 3- it is challenging intellectually and is often difficult.
2. Popular culture is ‘the valued experience of the mass of mankind’. It is films, CDs, DVDs, TV, musicals, football, pop concerts, hip-hop, rock and roll, salsa. It is often easy watching or listening, it is catchy and approachable. It doesn’t have to be explained.
3. Does popular culture require substantial investment? Yes, to produce a TV soap, a Hyde Park concert, a new DVD, a film, to create a first class football team all cost money.  But so does an opera, a TV serialisation of  ‘Bleak House’, buying the nation a Titian painting for £50m.
4. Does popular culture need to pay celebrities? Yes, but the big conductors like Sir Simon Rattle, performers like Pavarotti, opera and ballet dancers become famous and command big fees.
5. If high culture ‘low tech’?  One man writing a novel like Dickens or Shakespeare writing a play is ‘low tech’, but so is John Lennon writing a song. A folk singer in a pub is ‘low tech’ but that’s not high culture.
6. Creativity is part of all cultural production.  Many talented people went into films and popular music.  Someone like Leonard Bernstein was a talented classical conductor who wrote ‘ West Side Story’, a very famous and successful musical.

The people who thought of ‘Big Brother ‘ were creative. All TV takes talent and skill to produce.

7. ‘Small-scale distribution networks’ are part of the success of Arctic Monkeys who marketed themselves through the internet.  In the past, kings and rich men commissioned art and had music performed in their palaces.  The merchants shown in Rembrandt’s’Night Watch’ paid to be part of the picture.
8. Do we need to make the distinction between high and popular culture?  Postmodernists believe the distinction is artificial.  Andy Warhol produced his silk-screen print ‘Thirty are better than one’ as a comment on the exclusiveness of ‘Mona Lisa’.  Ironically, now that work is considered one of the great pictures of the 20th Century. 
9. Everything is being recycled in culture.  John Fiske defined culture as ‘the generation and circulation of meanings and pleasures’.  Shakespeare borrowed all his plots.  Music and films are constantly recycling old material. ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ is a version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, as ‘West Side Story’ is a remake of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Jacques Loussier made Bach into jazz and popular music is reusing old tunes and mixing them up.
10. Much of high culture was rejected when it first appeared.  Beethoven was booed at his concerts, Picasso was mocked for his paintings.  Van Gogh was criticised for his realistic portrait of the pregnant  prostitute called ‘Sorrow’, which is now seen as high art. T S Eliot a defender of high culture produced ‘Old Possum’s Book of Cats’, which was the basis of ‘Cats’ the musical.  Shakespeare has been both popular and high culture in the last 400 years.
11. The categories are fluid and the canon of today can be the forgotten work of the future.