Art, An Enemy of The People

This is a provocative book concerned with the social significance of high-cultural activities. It is a rejection of the role of art as the highest manifestation of society's achievements, exposing art as the perogative of elites and an enemy of the people. Art has not been with us for ever. According to Roger Taylor, it is of recent origins; its function has been one of class domination. The author argues that philosophy and aesthetics are responsible for illusions about art which give ordinary people an unjustified sense of inferiority. When these are penetrated -through historical and social investigation- the position of art as an enemy of the people becomes apparent. Popular culture is itself in danger of being weakened through attempts to reconcile it to high-culture. Roger Taylor has written for people who wouldn't normally read a philosophy or other book with intellectual pretensions. Roger Taylor looks at the history of jazz as an example of the threat to popular culture. Jazz has been absorbed by the cultural establishment. It is no longer a conflicting alternative to high-culture and no longer a truly popular culture. The arguments of Art an Enemy of the People were for when it was written and first published. Being committed to this contingency was the critique of philosophy which the book contains. Therefore, in preparing a second edition, no effort has been made to update its arguments. Its arguments were for then and not now. Arguments for now are contained in Roger Taylor's new book Invisible Cells and Vanishing Masses. Art an Enemy of the People is part of the history of anti-elitism and anti-art which developed in Cultural Theory during the latter quarter of the twentieth century. As Stewart Home says in his Mute interview with Roger Taylor, "Taylor was the first writer I'd come across whose arguments about art didn't exude the rotten egg smell of the idea of God". This book is then a challenging example from the history of Anti-Culture.