A Philosophy of Mass Art
by Noël Carroll
Category: Art

We live in a world dominated by mass art. Movies, TV, pulp literature, comics, rock music--both broadcast and recorded--surround us everywhere in the industrialized world and beyond. However, despite the fact that for the majority mass art supplies the primary source of aesthetic experience,the area has been neglected entirely by analytic philosophers of art. In The Philosophy of Mass Art, Noel Carroll, a leading figures in the field of aesthetic philosophy, attempts to address that lacuna. He shows why philosophers have previously resisted and/or misunderstood mass art and he developsframeworks for understanding the relation of mass art to the emotions, morality, and ideology discussing the accounts of such theorists in the field as Collingwood, Adorno, Benajmin, McCluhan, and Fiske. Mixing conceptual analysis and many vivid examples, the author proposes the first significant attempt at a philosophy of mass art in the analytical tradition concluding there are strong grounds for approaching mass art in the same fashion as high art.