Glass Box are a group of young, Parisian based artists who in recent years have attracted an increasing amount of critical and popular attention. As Sophie Berrebi has written, one of the reasons for their success lies in the fact, that they have shown that "the white cube gallery space isn’t the only way to show art, and that contemporary art can happily coexist beside other cultural activities". In their attempts to "bring together different aspects of contemporary culture beside art", Glassbox’s approach is indicative of much recent work. Aiming to produce engaging art which avoids the pitfalls and pratfalls of snobbism and condescension, they, like many others, have looked to transform the relationship between art / artists and the public. In this respect Glassbox have affinities with a great many artists in recent years. Like these artists, Glassbox have sought to use the forms of popular communication or new media to seek out and interact with other audiences beyond the usual art crowds.

In the last ten years there has been an explosion of artists producing work which has variously flirted with or enthused about, the forms of popular culture. Perhaps as a consequence of the growth of intellectual interest in popular cultural mediums, such as film and television, there has been a marked presence within art of these ‘other’ cultural forms. However this infatuation and absorption with popular culture hasn’t occurred uncontested. For many sections of the intelligentsia in particular, it is symptomatic of a crisis in contemporary art. ‘Dumbing down’ is now the buzz word for art in trouble.

Consequently scare mongers and doom merchants have taken disgusted pleasure from pronouncing the death of a radical role for art . Taking the brunt of the criticism, that art has now been totally assimilated within the economic structure of the ‘culture industry’, have been a generation of young artists. Too numerous and heterogeneous to mention, these artists have in the 1990’s frequently been chastised for betraying a critical, vanguard role for art. As evidence of the corruption or loss of a radical heart, the apparent media fueled glamour of young art, its supposed anti intellectual posturing and its unabashed immersion in popular pleasures and forms are trotted out as evidence of its guilt. Savaged as uncritical, imbecilic and willfully colluding with the bête noire of a true Avant Gardist, business, the fate of some young artists is, apparently sealed. And of course some of them deserve it. If the last ten years have witnessed an attempt by many artists to transform the role and position of art in relation to the broader culture and to its audience, it has also seen much careerist tourism.

However there are problems to the analysis that we are now saddled with an intellectually and artistically bankrupt version of a formally progressive model for art. Firstly this picture relies on an historical misrepresentation. In a tidy, self serving sleight of hand, those who now bemoan the dumbing down of culture and the loss of a say, a true Avant garde, are prone to offer a selective reading of the very Avant Gardes they profess to cherish. If young artists today are labeled as guilty of complicity and sell out, this accusation is grounded in an assumption that traditional, truly radical, older Avant Gardes existed and operated in an idealised, autonomous space, freed from the ravages of commodity culture. It is this base assumption of the historical absence of economics in art, which allows those doom mongers I spoke of, to lament the death of truly radical Avant garde art and deplore the vacuity of much of today's art.

But this analysis is knee capped by fallacious reasoning and bad history. Firstly instead of regarding artists as historically operating from a position, where their self identity was premised on their aloofness from filthy lucre, what if Avant Gardist always started at ground level from the assumption that all forms of culture are infused with economics. From this position the job of an artist is not to produce esoteric musings from a cocoon, but to offer a deeper engagement of the commodity form and its pleasures, however 'troubled' they might be. Basically immersion rather than abstention. The dark pleasure’s, the alienated consciousness, spawned by and through commodity culture or popular culture, are precisely the gristle upon which any artist should chew. Instead of regarding artists as superior, beyond the ravages and strictures of daily existence, such a position exposes the artists to the same forces as everybody else. Here the impacted sites of the body and mind under capitalism, becomes the true sites for artistic exploration, not as an anthropological field trip (lets see how the 'ordinary people are doing') but as a matter of necessity.

Of course the very notion of what exactly constitutes 'popular culture' is one fraught with confusion. After all, as has often been noted, the term popular culture was coined by intellectuals, aesthetes and the educated in order to refer to the culture of others. In other words, it was from the outset a projection. If the term popular culture refers to anything at all it is not the people or the culture it purports to name but the fantasies and anxieties of those who are doing the naming. This is why it is often said that ‘popular culture’ means nothing, that it picks out no specific set of cultural norms or qualities; popular culture is nothing other than the culture which is excluded from legitimate or cultivated culture (and defined from within legitimate culture as its other). This results in a very confused or at best weak sense of popular culture’s own identity. It gets worse. If popular culture is defined negatively and in a relational manner, then the radical incorporation of popular culture into the gallery creates even more problems. Insofar as artists translate or appropriate popular cultural pleasures into artistic gestures of inclusion, the things which count in popular culture - the forms of attention and affection which popular culture lives off - the very things which guarantee its popularity, are sidelined. Popular pleasures have had no pedigree within art.

The effect, of course, is that popular culture doesn’t attain its longed for prestige but loses its distinctive character. In part, this half hearted presence stems from the intellectual jeopardy artists place themselves in when working with popular cultural forms. The danger is that by virtue of their close proximity to a commercial, spoiled cultural form, the artist risks being branded as lacking sufficient critical distance . Having fallen through the safety net of artistic autonomy , the artist is tarred with the suspicion of sell out and complicity . Obviously there are real worries about the influence of capital, but significantly they are always overplayed, primarily as a means of securing the old values of high art. This is why scare mongers ring their bells of cultural apocalypse. After all despite the perception of anti intellectualism, the very reason for many younger artists engagement with the stuff of the broader culture, is specifically a criticism and attack on the snobbishness, cultural authority and power of a generation of "high art" elitists. It’s no coincidence that the rise in Britain in the 1990’s of an art immersed in the everyday, came directly after a period of over intellectual posturing and projection. Therefore as a form of defense, cultural conservatives overplay the threat of popular culture as a means of protecting their own prestige and cultural authority. This is a case of retreating from the complexities and tensions of existing within an alienated culture, for the sake of protecting a career.

It’s no wonder that in this climate of whipped up fervor over falling standards etc. that the dangers of being seen to fall too completely, to be seduced and beguiled by the corrupting pleasures of popular culture have generated a nervous, often half hearted engagement with popular forms. It is as if every tentative step towards the popular has to be followed by an over compensatory gesture of resistance to it, a theatrical restatement of art's need to rid itself of the philistine impulses in entertainment and commerce. Such artists are the bulimics of popular culture, the more they are drawn to it the more forcefully they immunise themselves against it. In part this state of affairs persists because the prejudice still holds, that art is almost always thought as innately benign and gracious, where as mass culture is always thought as malign.

As a consequence, it's often difficult to escape the notion of being stuck in an impasse. Elitists on the one hand pour scorn on what they regard as anti intellectual, anti art posturing while populists are scathing about the elitist snobbery of devotees of high art. This kind of polarisation, a cultural cold war no less, is of course useful only for those involved in internecine squabbles, helping as it does to shore and strengthen the cultural identity of each respective group. Those looking to invoke arts traditional claim to cultural prestige can guarantee this by the conjuring the phantom presence of its erstwhile adversary popular culture. However with regard the often insurmountable barriers of cultural division , such polemics of cultural cold war antipathy are simultaneously safe and destructive. Neither of these options is satisfactory. The situation requires us to think differently not merely think.

Rather than conceive of artists relationship to popular culture as one in which their capacity for critical reflection is extinguished by the terrors of popular culture, perhaps it is more profitable at this historical junction, to see today's artists as entangled in the operations of power, exploitation and seduction, which they are not blind to but submit nonetheless. Fundamentally this is a more complex relationship with the broader culture; instead of keeping
the pleasures (however potentially alienating) away from the confines of the white cube, many artists have sought to openly reveal their own engagement (as consumers perhaps) of these previously sullied forms. Allowing the denigrated pleasures of popular culture within such spaces, leaves any artists as a potential partisan of the least prestigious forms of pleasure and attention within culture.

If artists also stress their own love (love after all is capable of stomaching unsavory, unpalatable elements) for the forms of popular culture, they go some way to developing a stronger identity for popular culture within art. In this view, engagement with the stuff and fluff of popular culture doesn't require an artist to adopt an either or position. It doesn't mean that the artists has to pretend that consumer culture is innocent, presents no danger, or has no unctuous effects. And conversely it doesn’t require them to adopt an anthropological, distanced position which studies clubbers or ballroom dancers, like ants under a microscope. Just as sociologists have argued cogently that it is implausible to treat the consumers of popular culture merely as 'dupes', so with this approach, the artists subjection to the pleasures of popular culture is never as passive as it may seem, never the complete extinguishing of agency, responsibility and self-determination that populist abandon threatens. What it does do is identify them with the subjects of popular culture, rather than distinguish him from them as an artist, intellectual or critic.

The writer Slavoj Zizek has claimed to make the same identification himself: the idiot for whom I endeavor to formulate a theoretical point as clearly as possible is ultimately myself. And again, lining up the sublime with the ridiculous, Zizek says, I am convinced of my proper grasp of some Lacanian concept only when I can translate it successfully into the inherent imbecility of popular culture. Zizek, in effect, takes us full-circle in our understanding of the relationship between theory and popular culture. No more is the intellectual inviting us merely to keep our eyes and ears open for the rare occasions on which popular culture can present us with little gems, or how radical theory can be used to decode the cryptic resistance which popular culture harbors in its difference from official and elevated culture. Zizek doesn’t even settle for the relativistic or populist celebration of popular pleasures. Neither does he deny that popular culture is, or might be, imbecilic. What is important about Zizek’s account of the relationship between theory and popular culture is that instead of using intellectual categories and values to enlighten us about the neglected significance of cinema, TV, haircuts and trainers, Zizek uses banal and imbecilic culture to test the categories and values of social theory. None of this implies that popular culture has finally become legitimate or legitimating, but it does suggest that the old prejudices against it have been discredited at least to the point that we can refer to it without assuming or confirming its worthlessness. Zizek does not dismantle the hierarchies of cultural division but he is attempting to establish new and less divisive relations between theory and popular culture. If it was once thought that pleasure – especially popular pleasure – ought to be monitored and restrained by the enlightened law of the intellect, then Zizek, and indeed any young artist willing to get his or her hands dirty, has learned that love is another form of intelligence. Loving popular culture is not the antidote to the elitist or radical rejection of it, but love certainly sees what critique is blind to.

Cultural division and the hierarchies of pleasure has meant that intellectual culture has failed to have any love for popular culture. Learning about popular culture is not enough; learning to love it is a good start. Bring on the partisans.