A Philosophy of Mass Art

We live in a world surrounded by mass art. Movies, TV, pulp literature, comics, rock music--both broadcast and recorded--surround us everywhere. Yet despite the fact that for the majority of people mass art supplies the primary source of aesthetic experience, the area has been neglected entirely by analytical philosophers of art.

In this pathbreaking new book, a leading philosopher of art provides an accessible and wide-ranging look at the topic. Noel Carroll shows why philosophers have previously resisted and/or misunderstood mass art and he develops frameworks for understanding the relation of mass art to the emotions, morality, and ideology. He also discusses the major theories of such pivotal figures as Collingwood, Adorno, Benjamin, McCluhan, and Fiske. Mixing conceptual analysis with many vivid examples, Carroll forges the first significant attempt at a philosophy of mass art, concluding that there are strong grounds for approaching mass art in the same fashion as high art.