ROSALIND KRAUSS
351
media based mass culture, involving both a resistance to the
sign 's or image's function within an historically understood
context and a lowering of the possibilities for internal textual
complexities. The features I speak of have not been internalized
by the visual arts alone. They account, for example, for the
appea rance within literature of a particularly virulent outbreak
of autobiographies, thinly masked as fiction . But I leave it to this
audience to elaborate further on these connections.
Michael Wood
I'm glad Robert Brustein mentioned BBe 2, because I was
thinking of a radio ancestor of BBe 2, the Third Programme, as
a means of locating my own stand, if that's what it is, on some of
the issues we are here to discuss. I certainly don't have a single
position on the question of high versus low culture, but rather a
series of (I hope, fairly firm) positions on different fronts. But I
can perhaps best summarize this set of positions by saying that I
believe very much in the importance of highbrow offerings like
those of BBe 2 and the Third Programme, and would fight hard
to defend them, but that most of the time I find I like the
idea
of
the Third Programme better than I like the reality, and often
enjoy
something else far more, something sloppier and less
reputable.
With this in mind, I'd like to consider a question that comes
up very early in all discussions of high and low culture: the
question of standards. The usual complaint is that the noble
standards of high culture are being contaminated by the messy
permissiveness of low culture, which has no standards at all.
It
is
easy to identify, and to reject, the extremes in this debate. No one
here, I take it, thinks that we should do without standards
entirely, should consume any old junk at all, on the grounds
that discriminating between junk and not-junk is discrimina–
tory. And I take it that no one here is happy with the thought of
art as merely a form of talent contest, or wine tasting ("Not a
great
writer, but .. ." ), in which our major concern would be
