Hysterical fears regarding the corrupting power of popular culture have pervaded intellectual and artistic thought in the 20th century. Post second world war, Greenberg’s pronouncements concerning the imminent defeat of high art at the hands of a tidal wave of kitsch, coupled with Theodore Adorno’s analysis of the alienating properties of mass produced entertainment - the culture industry as he termed it, resulted in a fairly strong consensus as to the evils of mass culture.

However, with the explosion of youth culture in the late 50’s, the established cultural order was challenged, and for some the perspective changed. Rather than rubbish the new mediums of film, television and pop music, as many self-professed elitists (such as TS Eliot did), some artists and intellectuals sought in differing ways, to rescue them from neglect and derision. In art, pop turned its attention to the icons of baby boom consumerism Elvis and Marilyn, while intellectuals ,especially those resident at Birmingham Universities Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies , staked a claim for a broader, less divisive conception of culture. Raymond Williams "Culture and Society" and Richard Hoggart’s "The Uses Of Literacy", stand as seminal texts in this academic discovery of the culture of ‘everyday’ people. Suddenly academics and artists realised that not all ‘ordinary people’ (as they are often contemptuously refereed to), are as it turns out, brain dead zombies comatosed by the corrupting, alienating effects of television, cinema, fashion, pop music, newspapers ...

Today book shops heave under the weight of critical analysis of everything from TV soaps to mopeds. Anything it seems can now go into a Ph.D. thesis or the pages of art magazines like Frieze. The positive legacy of cultural theorists such as Hoggart, Williams and later Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie and John Fiske , as with the artists of pop art , was that they significantly helped to expand the range of could -no should be considered worthy of the name of ‘Culture’. However old prejudices die hard.

Even though popular culture has been intellectually and artistically rehabilitated, this cultural redemption is still compromised by the ghoulish spectre of money. Popular cultures whoring with corporate pimps, has necessitated that all analysis has to be carried out under controlled, sterile circumstances. Intellectual and artistic thought has to be protected from contamination by crass commercialism (of course art isn’t commercial or a business!). In art this has often resulted in the appropriation (a favourite postmodern buzz word) of popular cultural forms possessing a highly anemic flavour. Because it is supposed to go without saying that only art has the capacity for critique while popular culture has none, artists who get too close to popular culture are deemed to be in mortal danger of sacrificing art’s potential for critique. Consequently to protect themselves against the dangers of falling through the critical safety net, artists and academics, are required to stress their critical distance from the material being used. Every tentative step towards the popular has to be followed by an over compensatory gesture of resistance to it, a theatrical statement of arts need to rid itself of any philistine tendencies in entertainment and commerce. The usual trick is to adopt the guise of an anthropologist, talk about deconstruction (should that be dissection?) and generally give no hint of actually taking any pleasure or enjoyment from the film, TV programme, item of fashion .. which is under the artistic microscope.

The case of video art is a good example. To insure viewers are under no delusions that what they are seeing is ART and NOT television or cinema, proper video art has to be boring : black and white or muted colours, slowly paced, no sound and of course minimal editing (leaving a camera on a tripod to record thirty minutes of performance is obligatory it seems). Not all video is of course like this. Artists like Bruce Nauman or Stan Douglas aren’t scared of getting their hands dirty with a bit editing, colour, sound, pace, all the ‘terrifying’ elements of commercial cinema. Crucially of course they still manage to make something which is art - not simply a rehash of commercial TV or cinema. However the fact that the elements of cinema and TV which make it pleasurable, entertaining and popular exist within the work, makes their work stronger. Nobody could call their work anaemic.

It would be stupid to pretend that some of the fears about popular culture are unfounded. Popular culture isn’t uncontaminated by the stench of filthy lucre. But pretending that art somehow is pure and miraculously exists beyond such pollution is folly. Art and artists are as entangled as everyone else. Time to get your hands dirty.