tips on radiance

In his book Highbrow Lowbrow, Levine describes the historical emergence of a cultural hierarchy in the United States during the nineteenth century. Before that time there was little cultural stratification—be it of cultural products or of audiences. This was a time when opera could exist simultaneously as a popular and an elite art form, a time when American audiences might hear a soliloquy from Hamlet and a popular song in the course of an evening’s performance. Levine tells us no art form – opera, theater, painting – was "elevated above other forms of expressive culture… they were part of the general culture and were experienced in the midst of a broad range of other cultural genres by a catholic audience that cut through class and social lines. This situation began to change after mid-century." 

The change, which Levine calls ‘the sacralization of culture’ involved the establishment of a hierarchy of cultural products and spaces…. The reasons for [this] in the nineteenth century are, as Levine argues, complicated. Then as now, "culture"—as a concept—had politico-economic as well as aesthetic and social resonance, and "aesthetics by themselves cannot account for the nature of the mores and institutions" that accompanied the historical development of high culture. As Levine observes, "these were shaped by the entire [historic] context—social, cultural, and economic—in which that development took place". Certainly, the categorization and stratification of cultural products seems, at this remove at least, to be the logical aesthetic extension of the stratification, compartmentalization, and commodification that accompanied most cultural production during industrialization and the rise of capitalism. And as leisure activity increasingly became both a signifier of social status and a reason for cultural consumption, it was only natural that the cultural products consumed during leisure time would themselves emerge as important signifiers of social prestige and class standing. 

But while Levine stresses the need for a holistic paradigm to explain the cultural shift that occurred in the U.S. during industrialization, he also emphasizes the degree to which the sacralization of culture served particular partisan political goals. For Levine, cultural stratification was one logical outcome of a conservative political reformation: "Once we understand that the drive for political order was paralleled by a drive for cultural order, that the push to organize economic sphere was paralleled by a push to organize the cultural sphere, that the quest for social authority (‘the control of action through the giving of commands’) was paralleled by a quest for cultural authority (‘the construction of reality through definitions of fact and value’) we can begin to place the cultural dynamics of the turn of the century in clearer perspective." 

Certainly, we see the way that the impetus to sacralize specific cultural products, spaces, and historical artifacts as “culture” had the same sociopolitical and economic implications it has today. Now, as in the late nineteenth century, "there is… the same sense that culture [in the sacralized sense of the word] is something created by the few for the few, threatened by the many, and imperiled by democracy; the conviction that culture cannot come from the young, the inexperienced, the untutored, the marginal".

- Joan Hawkins, The Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (p. 10-11)