Why I Love TV, Not Movies

Essay by honeyGGUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, March 2009

download word file, 7 pages 5.0

Why I Love TV, Not MoviesI belong to a time when people do not have much time or patience to appreciate cultural products belonging to the serious genre. This might be due to our lack of training and exposure to creative or original artistic visions. Maybe my social, financial and cultural milieu comes in the way of my positive reception to such things. I may be deficient of, as what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu says (1993), sophisticated cultural upbringing and training that high culture (like art films, operas) needs. There is a sharp distinction between the ways high and low cultures are defined and appreciated. TV soap operas and entertainment slots attract me simply because I belong to the more conventional types, that Bourdieu says to be coming from a socially, economically and/or culturally under-privileged section. I fully agree with Bourdieu who says that high culture, remains unconcerned to the public (the readers / viewers / buying and reading people) sneering the so-called "market".

I have seen some of my rich and affluent friends, who sneer at ordinary people enjoying multiple award-winning popular Amercian cable television program, albeit the original show was telecast from 1998 until 2004. I liked the series as it dealt with socially important issues such as sexually transmitted disease, safe sex, multiple partners, promisculity and women's role in modern societies-- issues that we face everyday in our lives. Yet my snooty friends snubbed me, saying that "real" art does not concern itself to flatly as the media do and that real art, is guided more by a sense of "creativity" or "originality" and used the language of the so-called "art".

In real art, for example the Opera Troubadour by Verdi, they say the plot should not dominate over the artistic elements. Even a person who...