| Popular culture in everyday life is all around us. It should be the most familiar and common thing. However, as Hegel said: familiarity is not true knowledge. We actually know very little of the popular culture in our everyday life. From the beginning of the 20th century, due to its fast development, society has gradually lost its traditional, mysterious hue, and aesthetics and culture have begun to lower their posture, entering the common people’s lives; put in other words, aesthetics and culture have started undergoing the process of socialization. |  |
Material World – Zhao Yonggang
Popular culture in everyday life is all around us. It should be the most familiar and common thing. However, as Hegel said: familiarity is not true knowledge. We actually know very little of the popular culture in our everyday life.
From the beginning of the 20th century, due to its fast development, society has gradually lost its traditional, mysterious hue, and aesthetics and culture have begun to lower their posture, entering the common people’s lives; put in other words, aesthetics and culture have started undergoing the process of socialization. At the same time, also due to its progress, the everyday society has gradually increased its cultural and aesthetical intake, and has started to promote individuality, nibbling at the border of aesthetics and culture. This is also called: “first fill your stomach, then think of beauty; first put on clothes to keep you warm, then look for prettiness; first have a secure home, then seek pleasure.” Step by step, people have started to embellish themselves and their lives. Furthermore, through embellishment and cultural enlightenment, people achieve emancipation and, consequently, start aesthetically and culturally to discover and cultivate themselves and their lives. Aesthetics and culture in everyday society have become an indisputable, widespread fact.
However, market-oriented economy, technological civilization and globalization have created a world taste that had not existed before; following common aesthetics, cultural preferences or popular culture in everyday life is no more than this unprecedented world taste that is the direct expression of the common preferences in aesthetics and culture reflected in day-to-day life.
Food, clothing, shelter and transportation. Popular culture in everyday life. The latter implies a desire for desire. Therefore, it is actually not satisfying a pre-existent need, but the anticipation of a brand new necessity. The popular phenomena or the aesthetical and cultural quests in everyday life are only a material form, unlike the concept of popular culture in everyday life. Popular culture primarily represents a new set of values, and only secondly a material form. Therefore, its creation and acceptance undoubtedly represent our creation and our acceptance of this new set of values. This is the main difference between popular culture in everyday life and popular phenomena and aesthetical and cultural quests.
Popular culture in daily life comprises six aspects: preferences, images, behaviors, objects, language and environment. Within the preferences, we can distinguish popular taste, style etc.; images refer to popular images found in fashion, modeling, the feminine image, stars, etc.; behaviors refer to popular behavior and contact; objects refer to popular objects like cars, cell phones, leisure magazines etc.; language refers to popular language; environment refers to popular environment, architecture, anthropological landscape, etc. All these aspects set up together are what we so commonly call clothing, eating, dwelling and walking.
We plan to analyze various artworks and to discover how the artists communicate through these works in the terms of their feedback and understanding of popular culture in everyday life.
