When Did Popular Culture Become Elitist?

Have we misunderstood how elite culture is created?

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at dusk. Photograph by the author.

Shakespeare, opera and Dickens occupy a peculiar place in our cultural imagination. We associate them with aristocrats in private boxes, expensive tickets and audiences drawn from the upper classes. Or we picture the stereotypical Dickens reader in a smoking jacket, sipping mature brandy while seated in a leather armchair surrounded by mahogany bookcases.

So different from the ubiquity of reality television and the mass appeal of streaming services.

But is that really true?

If we look at ballet, an art form created for the courts of royalty, it has always carried the whiff of elitist entertainment, even after opening to the public. And yes, some theatre productions do carry that same upper-class mystique.

However, this hasn’t always been the case for what we now consider elitist culture.

On further examination, most of these art forms that we now place on a cultural pedestal began life as popular entertainment.

Shakespeare wrote his plays for the public. He needed audiences to attend in order to keep the theatre running. His plays were written so that people would want to return. In fact, visiting the Globe in London gives you a feel for what those performances were like, with its standing area at the front of the stage creating an atmosphere closer to a rock concert than a modern theatre production. Crowd interaction was encouraged, and music was often woven naturally into many performances.

Public opera houses opened the genre to paying audiences of all classes. People attended for the spectacle, the music and the celebrity performers as much as the story itself. Again, opera arguably occupied the same position of mass appeal and cultural relevance that television and streaming do today.

Dickens was famous for his public readings, performing his books before crowded theatres filled with audiences from all levels of society.

So what has changed? Have we dumbed down? Have we, the public, lost the ability to enjoy more refined forms of art?

If you briefly look at current television schedules, you will see plenty of reality TV shows, game shows and formulaic police procedurals. Based on that first impression, you may fall into the trap of thinking our cultural palate has weakened over generations — the cultural equivalent of the Eloi from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

But dig further and mine the veins of content across streaming services and terrestrial television. There you will uncover thoughtful, nuanced and emotional stories that pull at the threads of the human condition.

Whether it is the world of crime in The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, historical dramatisations such as Chernobyl, or social introspection in the recent series Adolescence, the demand for quality entertainment remains remarkably strong.

So if we still consume challenging, high-quality media, why, as a mass audience, did we fall out of love with the Bard and Tosca?

The theatre of Shakespeare’s time had an outdoor section exposed to the elements. Anyone who has visited the Globe in London knows the dangers of either sunstroke or pneumonia while standing at the front of the stage. This alfresco approach eventually gave way to indoor theatres that provided seating and greater comfort.

These new venues offered audiences a more intimate atmosphere.

Opera increasingly found itself competing with newer forms of entertainment such as music halls. These offered a mixture of comedy and music, often performed in the audience’s own language rather than the composer’s native tongue.

The evolution continued with the introduction of radio, cinema and television. Audiences now had a variety of cheap and readily available alternatives far beyond anything available to previous generations. Today that choice has expanded further through streaming services and user-generated platforms such as YouTube.

But audiences weren’t simply pulled towards something new; they were also being pushed away from the medium they once loved.

Two forces were now working together.

As venues improved their services to retain audiences, costs inevitably rose. Everything became more sophisticated. Theatre seats required upholstery, buildings needed heating and lighting, and increasing investment was required for sound systems capable of delivering even the quietest line with clarity.

In most industries these rising costs can be offset through greater productivity. In the arts, however, there is the problem known as Baumol’s Cost Disease.

The principle is simple. Performing a Mozart string quartet in the eighteenth century required four musicians and around thirty minutes. Performing that same quartet today still requires four musicians and around thirty minutes.

Unlike manufacturing, where productivity gains can offset rising wages, live performance has natural limits.

Eventually the remaining audience became smaller, wealthier and more influential. This was not an aggressive takeover by the upper classes but an inevitable consequence of them being the only demographic still able to justify the rising costs.

In the end, only the affluent remained, holding the metaphorical keys to the opera houses.

The tastes of the remaining audience naturally carried greater influence. Venues catered for the audience they still had rather than the audience they had lost. To retain those customers, they introduced drinks, luxury services and repeated the classics — the “greatest hits” of the medium. In doing so, the focus increasingly shifted towards the past, with only the occasional new work providing a sense of novelty.

As smaller, more affluent audiences became the primary supporters of these art forms, the wider public gradually became estranged from what had once been their own entertainment.

We can already see this move towards elitism in the world of cinema.

In the 1960s, a cinema would typically have one screen, large audiences and tickets that were inexpensive relative to average wages.

Today’s cinema experience offers premium seating, IMAX, 3D, 4DX and multiple screens. The films themselves have become vastly more expensive to produce, meaning ticket prices have had to rise to cover these increasing costs.

Movies are now so expensive to make that studios are reluctant to take risks. A film no longer has to succeed; it must justify an enormous investment. Consequently, one $300 million film is produced instead of ten $30 million films, resulting in less choice for audiences and fewer people attending. That, in turn, requires further ticket price increases to maintain profitability.

We are already seeing alternatives to new releases appear on cinema screens. Ironically, live theatre productions are now broadcast in cinemas, alongside classic films that audiences want to experience “as they were meant to be seen”. Re-releases have become increasingly common, with both The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the original Star Warstrilogy serving as recent examples.

To enhance the customer experience, cinemas now offer alcohol, luxury seating and, in some cases, on-site restaurants.

Experience has become cinema’s competitive advantage rather than the films themselves.

Yet, steadily, audiences drift towards streaming, leaving only those willing and able to pay rising prices as the remaining pilgrims to the silver screen.

As technology continues to advance, this migration of mass audiences is unlikely to stop. Console gaming is becoming increasingly cinematic and immersive, competing not only with streaming but also with online content platforms such as YouTube. Meanwhile, subscription prices are already rising as streaming platforms attempt to fund increasingly expensive headline productions.

Maybe elitism isn’t simply the class struggle over culture that we have long believed it to be. Perhaps economics is one of the principal forces shaping the cultural landscape.

If that assumption is true, perhaps our culture has never really become elitist at all. It may simply be that every successful medium eventually evolves until it becomes too expensive to remain an effective form of mass entertainment.