Trash culture

The term “Trash culture” entered in the common use from the ‘80s to indicate artistic or entertainment expressions considered of low cultural profile, able, thus, to stimulate and attract the audiences.

It refers, as an adjective, to books, movies, TV shows, etc. being characterized by poor taste, vulgarity themes and subjects voluntary chosen and with self-satisfaction to attract the audience through what is shoddy, of low quality, and culturally impoverished.

As a noun, it can be referred to the spread of the trash, the theorists of trash, TV trash, trash sub-culture. Taste tendency based on the recycling, often pleased and shown, of what is culturally decayed.

In this sense Trash culture is defined as the validation of the voyeuristic sight of the middle class which approaches to the popular culture as style of consumption.

The concept of trash culture should not be confused or melted with the concept of “Kitsch”, even if the two definitions are correlated. Kitsch is linked to art in a permanent way, but it is also a social phenomenon which establishes itself as a way of being: in the Western society it is characterized by the limitation of the artist’s space of creation. Kitsch is essentially multiplication and reachability. It is based on the consumeristic civilization that create to produce, and produce to consume. It is a repetition whose consequence is a new activity in the relationship between man and environment: the consumerism.

In this sense the concept of Trash Culture can be considered an evolution of the 19th century concept of Kitsch; a development of a consumeristic behavior that, at the beginning, was related to the lowest social classes. Now the phenomenon has embraced a wider range of classes, reaching for sure the contemporary middle class and some cases of high class members. As Kitsch was a social phenomenon that established itself as a way of being, so Trash Culture can be defined, but in this one the aim of a continuous process of creation and consumption is the externalization and the accentuation of the self being, that can be expressed through the way of dressing, wearing accessories, and through the self social approach.

The popular culture that surrounds us in our daily lives bears a striking similarity to some of the great works of literature of the past. In television, movies, magazines, and advertisements we are exposed to many of the same stories as those critics who study the great books of Western literature, but we have simply been encouraged to look at those stories differently.

The great literature and cultural work of the past has been rewritten for today's consumer society, with supermarket tabloids such as The National Enquirer and celebrity gossip magazines like People serving as contemporary versions of the great dramatic tragedies of the past. Today's advertising repeats the tale of the Golden Age, but inverts the value system of a classic utopia; the shopping mall combines bits and pieces of the great garden styles of Western history, and now adds consumer goods; Playboy magazine revises Castiglione's Renaissance courtesy book, The Book of the Courtier; and Cosmopolitan magazine revises the women's coming-of-age novels of Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Edith Wharton.

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