Informal Youth Cultural Practices: Blurring the Distinction Between High and Low

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that art educators need to focus on informal youth cultural practices in order to develop art projects that are meaningful to young people and relevant to their contemporary social media and postmodern artistic context. First, this article reports on doctoral research that examines informal youth cultural practices in cyberspace, or those taken up by young people "behind the scenes" of school art education and institutional curricula. Various methodological approaches, including a multiple case study, were used to understand the lesser-known dimensions of teenagers’ cultural capital. The results underscore the importance of image-processing software in fostering the teenagers’ appropriation skills as well as their technical, artistic, and identity exploration. The results also show that the teenagers’ creative processes and visual productions migrated from their art class to digital social networks. Furthermore, the youth participants, whose informal cultural practices drew from different genres (friendship-driven and interest-driven), expressed a vision of cyberculture focused on the blurring of cultural boundaries. Second, this article examines an art project related to the author’s doctoral research. The project mobilized the viral distribution of gossip on a digital social network and addressed informal youth creative practices through the notion of cultural landmarks. Cultural landmarks refer to key pedagogical resources that connect teenagers with their culture in art education. Cultural landmarks emanating from commercial culture and young people’s informal ways of expressing their inventiveness in digital and analog spaces generated art products and practices that blurred distinctions between high and low culture. Such blurring also happens in the broader context of contemporary art, justifying the need for art educators to consider informal youth cultural practices in their classrooms.

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