Killing time: Contemporary representations of opera in British culture

Abstract

Recent debates about ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and the perceived repositioning of such categories have had potentially profound implications for opera. British artist Sam Taylor-Wood’s video installation Killing Time (1994) provides a useful starting point from which to explore these polemics. By juxtaposing images of mundane daily life with a soundtrack drawn from Strauss’s Elektra, Taylor-Wood seems to present opera and ‘the everyday’ as irreconcilable. Yet, the perception of opera as highbrow has by no means been a historical constant in Britain. This article considers the extent to which opera may be regaining the ‘entertainment status’ it enjoyed for a period during the late nineteenth century, or whether its perception as an ‘elite’ product is more deeply ingrained in British culture than ever before. Killing Time’s critique of opera and the commentary it offers on voice, art as redemption, and the politics of participatory art are analysed and contrasted with the representation of opera in a more ‘popular’ medium, a reality television series in which members of the public were trained as opera singers. The article concludes that, while popular culture seems able to embrace opera, the more uneasy relationship today is that between opera and other forms of ‘high art’.