Omnes Cultura Tres Partes Divisa Est?

Extract

“Good art is commercial art”—Andy Warhol

I have been asked to comment on the implications of a sector of culture being examined as popular within the typology adopted by Karin Barber to describe cultural strata in contemporary African societies. In order to face her enormous and daunting task (an intellectual call to arms which few other scholars would have had the courage, or the wide ranging intellectual ability, to meet so successfully) Barber adopted the standard cultural typology from European models, a typology which she finds discomforting, but never actually rejects:

The typology which emerges again and again on African arts is a tripartite one: traditional, popular, elite. “Popular” then means only some of the common people: that is, the common people who are not principal peasant carriers of the established communal oral traditions…The common people divide popular and traditional arts between them.

I contend that this typology emerges again and again because it is innate—not in African societies, but in us. For whatever Indo-European archetypal, psychosexual, or categorically imperative reasons, Western scholars and scholarships are doomed to threes. Aside from our own cultural compulsions, and the attractive contrastive model that this tripartite division of African societies provides, I do not believe that there is any inherent reason why contemporary African culture should be so tri-sected in order to examine a phenomenon which appears to be unitary. I would argue that popular art is better understood as the product of a seamless web spun by the world market place which entangles every class in Africa to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the accessibility of that class to that market. Just as the cultural influences extending from the world market are pervasive, so the response to those influences is essentially the same, whether the respondent/artist is a village gin distiller, an urban bicycle repairer, or a university trained novelist. But this argument grows out of the aesthetic nature of popular art, and it is to that commodity as described by Barber that this argument must turn.