much-romanticized landscape<\/a> by Gainsborough and characterizes it not as a study of nature, but a boast by the aristocratic couple who commissioned and sat for it, a Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, who see the beauty of their land as a representation of their importance; just another aesthetic object that they own. This obviously doesn\u2019t mean old art is bad. But it complicates the picture to add in the socio-economic context: that the valorization of beautiful things, things that can be transfixing, even transformative to many people, has always been tied up with status and possession\u2014and possession necessitates exclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nAs with any other show in the age of tabbed browsing, it is tempting to pause Frasier<\/em> mid-episode so you can Google references you don\u2019t get. In the case of most sitcoms, this means looking up obscure celebrities from the 1970s who were probably a big deal when the writers were young. In Frasier<\/em>\u2019s case, this means reading the plot of La Traviata <\/em>and maybe watching a bit from Youtube. You don\u2019t have<\/em> to do this, but you might convince yourself it\u2019s a way of getting cultural vegetables into your diet. (I hear what you\u2019re saying, bellowing to me from your Eames chair: \u201cAisling, this is preposterous. Frasier is a comedy show, not a lecture series.\u201d<\/em> Well, is Frasier<\/em> a stupid way of understanding \u201chigh culture\u201d? Yes. Is there a less stupid way? Arguably no. The arts world is full of arbitrariness and gatekeeping. You may as well get your knowledge from a TV series with a funny dog in it.) All the while, as you squint at a low-quality video of an orchestra pit, you might quietly think to yourself: is there something I\u2019m not getting? Is it wrong to be bored? Would it feel different if I were there? <\/em>But even if you see La Traviata<\/em> in person, the questions might continue. Am I enjoying this the right amount? Is there a book I should have read? If I knew more about the context, would I like it more? Is everyone just pretending? Or is it fine just not to like it?<\/em> \u201cHigh culture\u201d by definition is always weighed down by these mille-feuille layers of questions: whether such-and-such work is part of the \u201ccanon,\u201d if its place is deserving, which translation is best, which version is best, whether one must see it live, whether one must read the notes, whether one must stand on one\u2019s head and watch the whole thing upside-down for the true experience to be granted by the arts gods. Sometimes our appreciation for a piece of canonized work can be instinctive and delightful, and often we\u2019re actually surprised. Perhaps this is an indictment of what the canon actually does to our relationships with art: it\u2019s not wrong for art to require effort to understand, but I\u2019m not sure it should feel like so much work.
Frasier<\/em> is a wonderful show. But it\u2019s also a document of the wall between the finest things our world produces\u2014or rather, what centuries of wealthy people proffer as the finest things our world produces\u2014and the vast majority of people. The Crane brothers\u2019 love of art appears to be genuine, although it\u2019s a love mediated by ego and classism. Even when their snooty friends are not around they sing and play piano, they strive to perfect their cordon bleu cooking, and they rhapsodize about turquoise inlay, giving their lives a richness that appears to bless them at times with pure happiness. Yet this happiness is facilitated by a ludicrous, never-ending pile of wealth, and the rigorous social training bestowed on them by decades of elite education and assiduous schmoozing. Most people\u2019s relationship with art is not quite so blessed. Financial and geographical hurdles, class relations, insecurities and social guessing games all work to turn culture into an ego trip for the rich and a minefield for everyone else. In Frasier<\/em>, works of art become a joke, presumably not because the writers hate art, but because the art serves to show how unrelatable the Crane brothers can be. But wouldn\u2019t it be nice if we lived in a world that took art seriously? And wouldn\u2019t that entail everyone having access to art?<\/p>\n\n <\/section>\n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Current Affairs<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Why does lowbrow entertainment about highbrow culture speak to us? Aisling McCrea explores the snooty universe of Frasier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2543,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267467"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2543"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267468,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267467\/revisions\/267468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}