The track record for this sort of edutainment is dodgy and its future
unclear. I remember, for example, curators at the Field Museum, in
Chicago, once telling me that they had brought recent traveling
exhibits about Harley-Davidson motorcycles and chocolate and couture
jewelry and Jacqueline Kennedy's dresses in hopes that visitors would
come to see the flashy stuff but then wander over to the more
substantive permanent exhibits, too. The curators also spoke of sugar
and medicine. Careful analysis of the foot traffic, however, revealed
that visitors came for the candy and exited the museum straightway — no
additional nutrition was ingested. -- Stephen Asma, CHE
Read the whole dodgy business. There's nothing wrong with using some pop culture as an explanatory level for philosophy, international relations, or any other brainy discipline. Necessarily. One problem arises at once, however: the same intellectual snobbery wherein philosophers think of themselves as on a higher plane than the peons in the cave applies to things of the cave, too; so I think The Simpsons is really quite genius while Seinfeld is horrible, dull, and pedestrian in every way. (Those early-90s clothes! That plonking, white-man-jazzy bass! Gahhhh!) What happens when philosophy degenerates into particularly erudite camps of pop culture partisans?
This seems the inevitable result of an attempt by officers of high culture -- or as Arendt would call it, culture -- to use low culture as a hook, Polonius style, to catch a carp of popular enthusiasm for works that transcend popularity with the bait of schlock and dross. I like me a Harley, don't get me wrong, but the Bodyworlds exhibit suggests just how coyly overt the technique can be: who wants to see the amazing scientific nature of life-sized dissected bodies preserved in plastic -- the ostensibly edifying point of the exhibit? People want to see skinless dead dudes with their heads exposed three layers deep playing football. People want a quick gawk, no deep contemplation, save that for our memorial ponds, thanks.
Pop culture is sugar -- fast tasty blasts -- but philosophy ain't no medicine, something you can gulp down like a shot of NyQuil and be done with. It must be savored, rolled around in the mouth, swished, spit out, tested against other sippings, and so on. When you get down to it, the use of pop culture as a heuristic by philosophy isn't a question of substance, but of format. Whatever's inside, the average person -- i.e. the person who isn't a philosopher -- seems more and more likely these days to exit the museum straightaway.
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