| May 2004 Missouri Regional Newsletter p2 |
| Ideas for Implementation
Attend both a popular music concert and a local symphony orchestra concert. Based upon your observations and experiences, write an article for your local or campus newspaper about the differences between high and popular culture. Invite a faculty member from the English department to a chapter meeting to watch the movie Shakespeare in Love. Ask the faculty member to lead your chapter in an exercise to compare the public's perception of Shakespeare's works in his day to that of the present day. Enjoy fellowship with a sister chapter at a local baseball game. Pay attention to how the sensory aspects of the event - sights, sounds, smells and tastes - contribute to the cultural experience. Discuss how your experience might differ if you attended a baseball game in Japan or Mexico. Partner with other campus groups (Spanish Club, French Club, etc.) to sponsor a "Culture Week" to learn about the popular culture of other societies. Create a documentary, entitled Twentieth Century Popular Culture, in which you interview people of every living generation. Ask them to define popular culture and give examples of elements of popular culture from different times in their lives. Sponsor a comedic skit competition open to the campus and community. Skits should follow the theme "Greatest Pop Culture Icons of the 20th Century." Visit www.warhol.org online, and observe the art of Andy Warhol, generally considered to be the progenitor of American pop art. After learning about his life and work, create your own pop art. What makes it "pop" Create a "New Millennium Time Capsule" with relics of popular culture that would tell the story of our lives to historians who live 1,000 years in the future. Create a timeline of popular culture that has become high culture. Post the timeline on your chapter's website and invite visitors to add items to the list. Then create a timeline of high culture that has become popular culture and post this timeline on your website. Peruse the USA TODAY newspaper, and identify the percentages of articles that deal with popular culture and those that deal with hard news. You must first determine what you consider to be popular culture. Arrange for a lively discussion between a fine arts instructor and an American studies instructor on the issue of whether certain works (paintings, dramatic performances, musical scores, etc.) that the chapter has chosen to review should be classified as fine art or popular art. Discussion Ideas Film: What, if any, are the differences between a popular film and an art film? Can an art film be popular culture? In what ways is film by definition a form of popular culture? Music: What criteria do we use to determine if music is popular? How do we determine which music artists become pop culture icons? |