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Eve of destruction, tax deduction......
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I was hoping it wouldn't come to this.... "On one level, what Barthes seems to be doing in Mythologies destabilizing the boundary between `high culture' and `popular culture'. Barthes accords popular culture a complexity, a density and richness of texture thought to be the sole preserve of high culture. One key example of this is wrestling discussed in the article `Le monde oł l'oncatche' (Barthes: 1970 pp.13-24). Wrestling is often thought of as the least intellectual pastime in our culture and is dismissed as vulgar fodder to the uneducated masses. What Barthes does, in a striking and provocative gesture, is claim that wrestling and its audience are in fact every bit as sophisticated as high drama or opera. Wrestling is a modern variant of the classical theatre or of an ancient religious rite in which the spectacle of suffering and humiliation is played out. Like these high cultural forms, wrestling is a formal spectacle informed by fixed codes and conventions and played out in rigorously formalized gestures and movements. It is every bit as codified, conventionalized and choreographed as classical tragedy - the dramatic genre to which Barthes compares wrestling throughout the article. Another important article which adopts a similar approach is `Au Music-Hall' (Barthes: 1970 pp.176-179) about, as the title suggests music hall. In this article Barthes invokes the nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire to describe the formalized beauties of the spectacle."
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Fuck art, lets dance..
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