High culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture.
In more popular terms, it is the culture of an elite such as the aristocracy or intelligentsia, but also defined as a repository of a broad cultural knowledge, as a way of transcending the class system. It is contrasted with the low culture or popular culture of, variously, the less well-educated, barbarians, Philistines, or the masses.
Read more about High Culture: Concept, High Art, Art Music, Promotion of High Culture, Theoreticians
Famous quotes containing the words high and/or culture:
“Brutes are deprived of the high advantages which we have; but they have some which we have not. They have not our hopes, but they are without our fears; they are subject like us to death, but without knowing it; even most of them are more attentive than we to self-preservation, and do not make so bad a use of their passions.”
—Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689–1755)
“When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)