On Trash Culture

Mr. Abazari’s controversial remarks about Mr. Pashai’s artistic style sparked a host of reactions from a spectrum of intellectuals, academics, and the general public regarding deplorable cultural life of the Iranians. This note is an attempt to explain why some styles of artistic works are more popular than the others and what can be done to enhance the cultural taste of a nation. 

(Assuming that there is such a thing as trash/low culture and high culture) there seems to be a positive correlation between the level of trash culture and the level of economic underdevelopment. Meaning that higher underdevelopment correlates with higher levels of trash culture in a given society. Why is it so? One explanation might involve the fact that the cultural products are luxury (superior) goods. 

As we know, the consumption of luxury goods depends on the level of income. With higher income, the consumption of luxury goods rises disproportionately, and with lower levels of income, there will be a disproportionate decline in the consumption of such goods.

This basic idea suggests that in high-income households, one should expect more of cultural products with better quality. By contrast, trash culture products can, by definition, be produced cheaper and hence would be more affordable for low income or middle-class households. Therefore, one would expect higher levels of trash culture among low income and middle-class households.

The problem is that the high culture proponents want to impose high culture on those for whom the culture is the least concern, because of their involvement in everyday life and struggle for making a living. For such families, since investing in culture and investigating which artistic product is of higher quality entails higher opportunity costs, they are better off forgoing such an inquiry at the first place (rational ignorance). Indeed, it is best for them to rationally ignore the cultural concerns, because they have a lot of more important concerns. Therefore, the artistic taste of low income and middle-class families may not change unless their economic status changes. 

Since it is not difficult to explain the abundance of trash culture among low-income households, the more intriguing question involves the presence of trash culture products among the rich. So, the main question is why one might see trash cultural products among the rich. There are two possibilities; first, those having trash culture tendencies among the rich might be outliers; second, the change in cultural tendencies is sticky and such a change cannot happen overnight or even in one generation. In other words, “it is impossible to become both educated [rich] and a gentleman in one generation.”

Based on such a simple analysis, to those cultural prophets who want to enhance and make an impact on the cultural education of the masses, I have three pieces of advice (if I may):

1. Forget about the poor, and probably the middle class. They most likely and perhaps rightfully will not heed you.

2. For the rest of the people including the rich, keep calm and let the water find its level.

3. Since there is huge economies of scale in selling cultural products, the artists are also better off engaging in producing trash culture and selling it to more people in low prices rather than producing high quality cultural products and selling them to fewer number of people. Therefore, it is not surprising to see a higher tendency towards trash culture not only among the general public, but also among artists. The third advice then follows: about culture, take it easy. Without substantial changes in economic livelihood, it is very unlikely to change cultural life by arrogantly yelling at the people.