Clearly people have differing opinions on the programming at this year’s Sydney Festival - I’ll show my cards and say that every year for the past three or four (that I’ve been in Sydney) I’ve found more in the program I want to see and hear.

High points this year:

• the Kev Carmody show at the State (Tex, the Drones, the Herd - even Claire Bowditch and Missy Higgins were great - but Kev’s voice had a texture, a quality that cut through me)
• the unexpected and disarming charm of Tunng
• the guys from Uber Lingua in Angel Place on the opening night
• Moodymann’s shambolic record spinning at the Beck’s Bar
• Weatherall, Pivot, Mountains in the Sky, Caribou and loads of other stuff was great too

Most of those acts could have played on a standard festival or on their own steam.

That’s the general criticism. The festival should use its funds/power to stage important, challenging art, rather than Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys at Bernie’s show. But getting people engaged in the festival takes talking to them, it’s a conversation about what art is - and if you’re not engaged with performance and art and music, then Brian Wilson’s necrotic wobble might take you back to a time when you were, giving you an in to the rest. Same with Weatherall or Low.

Mark Bahnisch from Larvatus Prodeo wrote about the high/low art thing in the Australian’s Higher Ed section on Wednesday.

High art or heritage arts (as Julian Knowles described in a comment to the previous thread) is the ‘dead white male’ stuff - Bach, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donatello, etc. Low art is the stuff you’re running into regularly - The Smiths and Kelis, Gondry, Hussein Chalayan, the Simpsons. One of the biggest differences between pop culture and high art is scale. Theatre production or classical performance demands specific location/space, people/talent, advertising and so on. An indie band comes road-box ready to ROCK! Okay, got a bit excited there, but you get my point. There’s a difference.

Bahnisch quotes Oxford researchers Tak Win Chan and John Goldthorpe’s cultural survey results:

We find little evidence for the existence of a cultural elite who would consume ‘high’ culture while shunning more ‘popular’ cultural forms … There are certain individuals who fit this description, but they are too few in number to figure in any survey-based analysis.

Bahnisch followed:

What they reveal is that the tired arguments counterposing high and pop culture have less and less resonance with reality.

So people don’t strictly consume high art, it tends to be high and low. But not low sans high, right? And while Shakespeare wasn’t exactly high art in his time, now it takes a certain amount of cultural capital - which Bahnisch crystalises as “the learned set of dispositions necessary to appreciate high culture” - to appreciate the nuances, the language, etc.

But you need to learn a new language of music and subcultural signposts to understand house music, too, or noise. You need context to understand any niche area of music making. That’s why people often dismiss such music at first glance, then come back as their understanding increases.

The idea of cultural capital comes from French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, and Bahnish argues that in Bourdieu’s time, there was a high correlation between bourgeois status and a taste for high culture. But Goldthorpe argues that status is now attached to material rather than cultural consumption - kicking the ladder out from art’s feet.

So, coming back to the festival, you’ve really got a few categories: high cost events that connect with people and those that don’t, and low cost ones that do/don’t too - then there’s the art context, you’ve got events that are challenging and events that are safe, and some of those are successful and some fail, too.

But art still plays an important role in our society, even if it’s not tied to the aspirations of the middle class, right? Should the festival’s limited dollars be spent on the art people need or the shows they want?