An integral part of our life is a way of spending leisure time. Someone reads detective stories and listens to pop music, while someone attends symphony concerts and gets acquainted with the work of classic writers.
An elitist culture, the features of which will be listed below, refers to the second way of satisfying aesthetic and intellectual needs. In addition to it, there are also mass culture and popular culture. They also have certain characteristics.
A few words about other types of crops
Mass culture, for example, is designed for the vast majority of society, for those people whose worldview does not have any outstanding features. As a rule, these are citizens with secondary education, working in the workplace or in the service sector.
Folk culture does not have an accurate portrait of the consumer. It is simply a reflection of established traditions in specific communities. The preference of folk culture to its other types cannot speak of the level of intellectual development.
The signs of "mass" and "nationality" were considered above in general terms and only so that the difference with the subject under discussion was visible. An elitist culture, the characteristics of which are rather difficult to describe in a nutshell, is designed for that segment of the population, which is commonly called the intelligentsia. This and its other features will be described in more detail below.
Elite culture. Signs
So, the target audience has already been mentioned. The intelligentsia is, as a rule, people working in the intellectual sphere. These include teachers, scientists, museum workers, libraries, artists, writers, composers and so on. However, one cannot be categorical and claim that an office worker (for example) cannot be a connoisseur of masterpieces of elite culture.
And what kind of masterpieces are these? Often they are deservedly called classics. These are literary works, the relevance of which only increases after a hundred, several hundred years. These are operas, sonnets, symphonies, ballet, theater, painting by great artists and monuments of talented sculptors.
In general, we can say that the subject under discussion was created over many centuries. The elitist culture, the signs of which we cover, is largely the creations of our predecessors. However, it is also impossible to say that the results of the spiritual and intellectual activities of our contemporaries can only be reckoned among the next “mass trinkets”.
These are not all signs of an elitist culture. It is curious that she even has a specific motto. It sounds like this: "Art for the sake of art." And here you can immediately see the difference with the mass (money vestments of traditions, customs and views of a particular ethnic community in material, oral or written form) cultures.
Elite culture. Examples
- Serious music (Bach, Mozart, Schnittke, Tchaikovsky, etc.).
- Highly intellectual literature (Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Ulysses, Kafka, Shakespeare, etc.).
- Fine arts (Michelangelo, Roden, Eiffel, Gropius, da Vinci, Van Gogh, etc.).