Robert Taylor - High Art and Psychographics

There was a moment early in the Adorno and Horkheimer piece that discussed the distinction between “High Art” and “Mass Culture,” and I remembered a conversation from the Queer Performance class last semester that a few of us in this class took. The statement was about the movie Brüno as High Art, and I was struck by the claim at the time and again while I was reading this piece, given the movie’s place in Mass Culture. 

How have the boundaries between High Art and Mass Culture changed and what distinguishes one form of culture from the other?

I learned about the term “psychographics” recently with a group of students, and I was trying to connect it to the idea of “popular” culture. Psychographics seeks to define people based on aspirations, attitudes, and psychological dispositions, including hopes and fears. All people experience emotions in similar ways, and psychographics is an attempt to understand how people’s emotions affect their habits, and this gives marketers a way of making the same product appeal to different groups of people. With the advent of the internet and algorithms and data tracking, marketers can get a pretty good sense of a person’s emotional identity based on their internet habits, and they can reliably predict marketing strategies that will appeal to people with similar dispositions. Writing that out actually creeps me out a little. Someone with more marketing experience might know better than me, but that is my basic understanding. 

We often use the term “demographics” as a shorthand for the categorization and generalization of large groups of people in marketing research based on more “traditional” notions of identity: race, age, gender, sexuality, etc. Hall gives us good reason to doubt this method of defining blocs of people, and I agree with his criticisms. 

How might psychographics serve as a better lens for thinking about large groups of people and their experiences or is the whole point that trying to define and understand large groups of people together is a futile endeavor no matter what lens we use?