If the shift of power from aristocrats to bougoisie caused the alienation of the worker...

Define high and low culture first

High culture: Opera

Low culture: Soap Opera

operas are literally soap operas with singing for booj though

This is exactly what I'm afraid of. All distinctions of higher and lower culture will be dismissed as class based spooks and everything will be rendered down into it's lowest possible form.

If people are free and atomized why would it inherently lead to a higher culture. They could very easily just sit around all day watching and producing trash.

What was high culture before Opera?

Popular culture is that way because the working class prefers it so. If deeply complex and artistic works were what the masses preferred then they would be everywhere. Instead all else being equal you'll see lower class people shunning everything that is even close to high art and consuming the cultural equivalent of meth.

Most cultural products before the industrial revolution were higher than those after. I suppose the original cultural products would be plays and epics.

But why would culture be lowered in quality under communism? More people would have access to far greater education and means to engage in the creative arts. The quality would increase, not decrease. And I don't understand why you're so keen on keeping the distinction between "high" and "low" culture, the main thing defining high culture is that it's consumed by the ruling class, not that it's better. It is a way for porky to claim intellectual superiority over the working class.

I disagree. Like I said, I spent a lot of time around "high culture" as a teenager because I was a talented musician at the time and was able to essentially sell my labor to be able to "see" the plays in some form. I'm a working class person, most of us here are working class, yet we are still reading what would be considered "intellectual culture" in the forms of Marx and Co. Working class people don't have some innate appetite for "cultural meth". People like myself disprove your idea just be existing. It seems more likely that communities and culture is influenced by what they are surrounded with. Grow up around nothing but gangbanging and "pimp bitch ho" music then no shock when that is your idea of "culture". Have you never heard a working class elder bemoan how the youth have lost touch with the roots of their community? It's consumer culture as the only affordable and available option. It's the failing school systems. It's not some "choice" of the working class. We don't even teach philosophy in American schools so kids don't even learn basic logic. Culture is heavily curated to keep churning out little worker bees who don't question too much.

This is outrageously naive. Do you think that high culture is so freely available to all? Do you think that it has any appeal whatsoever to people who are uneducated? Their class status is what keeps the masses from more sophisticated forms of culture.
If you look at the soviet union, high culture was greatly encouraged as the CPSU sought to make Opera, the Symphony and the arts available to everyone.
It is ridiculous to think that the quality of culture is determined by the class divide in and of itself rather than the sophistication and aims of its creators and consumers.

Are people seriously worried that deep, intellectually challenging art will disappear with the ruling class? The ruling class does not even produce any of it.

That's because any "distinctions" you believe there are just fictional

You're pointing at shit that you were never supposed to be able to enjoy–operas, classical paintings, all of this was for the aristocracy–and then maintaining bullshit class chauvinist ideas like "high" and "low" culture

This. Look it people like the trumps and the hiltons and then come back and tell me that purging these vermin wouldn't improve culture out of sight.

Seriously though, the poverty of mass consumer culture isn't really caused by one class or the other, but by capital itself. By creating a situation where almost all "art" is removed from the control of the artists themselves and driven by the profit motive to cater to the lower common denominator, you create a situation where it is difficult to create decent art/culture even if you want to. The solution to this isn't to put an "aristocratic" class back in control, but to give the artist himself complete control over his own work, something that is completely incompatible with class society of any kind. Even under feudal rule art was greatly hindered, not by capital but by the need to work for a patron, which restricts your work to either sucking aristocrat cock or more commonly, working for the church, churning out by the numbers religious art. In fact art really only began to flourish in the early modern era as capital started to take hold and feudal rule began to erode.
Personally I find it pretty funny that almost all art considered "great" by reactionaries comes from this period, a time during which their beloved nobility was actually on the decline.

Here, an excerpt from High Culture. It's an English classic.

Neither, you illiterate idiot.

Once again my point proven. Education is also higher today than it was during the aristocracy yet the culture is lesser. My fear is that with the equalizing and destructing of all society in so far as classes culture will also be brought down and equalized to its lowest common factor.

I can guarantee that most people here are middle class who have Bohemian pretensions. I really doubt that nearly any lower class people have some secret desire to go see plays and operas but simply can't afford it. Your argument really makes no sense and presupposes its own point. Why are movies like star wars cheaper than more complex plays in the first point? Why are there not a large number of complex and challenging movies instead of the simple ones like star wars if the masses would really love to see them if given similar prices? There is no inherent reason why complex cultural products are more expensive. And even if they were do you really think that the average construction worker would rather read War and Peace than see Rocky 3? I don't agree with Adorno's explanation of this phenomenon but at least it makes internal sense.

This is a good argument but isn't making a distinction between high and low culture emulating class distinction? Even simply education isn't enough to prefer and enjoy sophisticated art. Just like people will naturally prefer junk food I feel that most will gravitate toward lower culture. There's a different and more difficult form of enjoyment that comes from consuming complex art that doesn't stimulate you in same simple way. I fear by equalizing the lower and higher classes you will also equalize the lower and higher class cultures at which point people will natural prefer the lower because it's easier. The Soviet Union did encourage high art but I think this was idealistically inconsistent.

Trump and the Hitlons are my point exactly. They're bourgeois and have lead to the reduction in art we see today.

That's like saying it's not that drinking bleach is bad, it's the poison. The dominance of capital over society is a direct manifestation of the capitalist class.

Capitalism created this? As opposed to when? There's never been a time in which artists have control over their own work yet you talk like it's the default. There's only been two forms of artistic production and one was inherently better than the other. I think it's probable that instead of producing great works of art despite "high class dick sucking" that was a big part of why it was decent. It forced them to look above themselves. In other words if artists aren't sucking dick then they'll just be masturbating. I don't think your last point is accurate at all though but even if it was it's because early capitalists tried to emulate and outdo the aristocrats at their own game like North Korea calling itself a Democratic Republic.

God I love that scene but you stopped right before the even funnier part where the guy thinks the second flood is coming. But yeah comedy isn't inherently low. Even in that part it had a ton of cultural commentary that distinguishes completely beyond nearly all consumer culture comedy.

The distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture is a product of class society, however this is merely a classification based on who it is consumed by and who it is created by. 'High' culture like say the opera in made explicitly for the enjoyment of the ruling class, 'low' culture such as soap operas are made too by the bourgeoisie as entertainment to be consumed by the lower classes. In the capitalist system the culture industry is naturally oriented towards maximising profit and as such concerns itself not with providing stimulating and complex culture, but simple entertainment fit for easy consumption which can be enjoyed by the working class.
You misidentify sophistication with prominence under class society. 'High' culture is not so due to it being created by and for the bourgeoisie, but rather as it is created by and for people with sophisticated education and upbringing who are more capable of both enjoying it and accessing it in a world where the 'high' culture is restricted in both a sense of financial unavailability and social stratification. Sophisticated culture can only be created and fully enjoyed by sophisticated people. Naturally these are over-represented in the bourgeoisie.

Once liberty allows education and free development for all, as communism entails, all will be able to both create and consume sophisticated culture as a higher mode of production elevates the common man to the likes of Aristotle, Marx and Goethe, as new peaks rise beyond them.

I disagree that people by some design tend towards the simple and unhealthy, if this were so there would not be sophisticated culture altogether. Man desires to flourish and cultivate virtue, yet this can only happen under material conditions which allow it. Liberty is the condition for such development and in class society it is reserved for the ruling class, hence their sophistication. With he free development of each and all one would expect all to strive anew to eat healthily, educate themselves, cultivate virtue and sophistication, pursuing a flourishing of the individual.

Communism is not the equalisation of classes but their removal altogether, it entails the negation of the both bourgeois and proletarian. This is the removal of limits and the ushering in of true liberty for all.

I'm not sure what you mean by the USSR being idealistically inconsistent. Their advocacy of 'high' or 'bourgeois' culture for the working class was their way of pursuing the communist project and fashioning the 'new soviet man' of a classless society whereby all in society could be sophisticated. This may have been inconsistent with the USSR's productive base as socialism was not present there, yet it nonetheless was an admirable effort to educate and enhance their lives, even if it was them getting ahead of themselves.

I'd be interested to know how you class culture which is not the product of the ruling class altogether such as authentic folk music and culture emergent from lower classes.

I never said there's no difference between high and low culture. Your fears are unwarranted and you argue like a true leddit faggot.

I was making a joke. While scum like that certainly haven't helped, they exist as a symptom of an underlying problem: capital itself.

On the contrary, the rise of the capitalist class is the result of the generalisation of commodity production, of market relations penetrating almost every aspect of our society. Even if we killed off all the bourgeoisie and ran industry ourselves through workers co-ops this problem would still exist. Artists, either as individuals or working for firms, would have to compromise their work in order to cater desires of the general populous in order to make money. In other words they are dominated by the capital accumulation cycle (M-C-M'), by capital itself.

In primitive societies this is very clearly not the case, though art in the modern sense of the term arguably didn't exist. I'd also cite petty craftsmanship and personal works done by both peasants and nobilty prior to the rise of capitalism, as non-commodified, non-patronised art.

Bullshit. This is a completely baseless assertion. Artists operate within the parameters set by their patrons (or the market), it restricts rather than elevates. Imagine a lifetime of being restricted to painting portraits of nobility and stations of the cross for fucking churches, leaving the only room for actual artistic developement in your own spare time with limited materials, or sneaking subversive themes into the work you've been commissioned to do. Being restricted in such a fashion is a cultural fucking lobotomy, restricting art thematically to "isn't my lord/jesus wonderful?"

Again, pretty baseless. Bourgeois art prior to the 20th century tended to be far less restrictive than the aristocratic and religious art of the medieval period, even when working for a bourgeoisie patron they tended to have far greater freedom to explore themes and styles that they never had under feudal rule. Many artists were even able to operate independently to some extent (though not from the market obviously). There's a reason almost all art considered "great" comes from the last 400 years or so. Even "great" art prior to this period, such as renaissance art, comes from a place and time in which there was a massive rise in mercantilism, an increasing generalisation of commodity production constituting a kind of proto-capitalism within feudal society.
If you want to see true feudal art, you need to look back to gothic art, which aside from religious architecture and scupture, was mostly pretty shit to be quite honest. I can't really see the appeal unless you're an utterly jesus obsessed freak who likes paintings that lack perspective (seriously, they're fucking flat).