Best art that became wildly popular

Cafe Society
1

There are a couple of threads discussing how popular the Harry Potter franchise is despite its - um - less than stellar quality as works of literature/film. Got me to thinking that perhaps that is a necessary quality of any truly popular “craze” - because anything that is of too high quality may necessarily appeal extremely strongly to a more narrow audience, and may turn off other segments.

What would you offer as the truly best examples of art - film, painting, literature, etc. - that has met the greatest commercial success? I guess we may also have to distinguish between recent works and works that have stood the test of time.

2

The iconic Beethoven symphonies.

3

Charles Dickens was a massive best seller in his day. People hung on every chapter (the books were generally serialized). There was the story that people met the boat coming to New York with the latest episode of The Old Curiosity Shop and shouted, “Did Little Nell die?”

Over time, Shakespeare is probably number one. He was extremely popular in his day, and cemented his reputation as a great and popular playwright during the restoration. In 19th Century America, he was by far the most popular author around, with the population so familiar with his plays that a scene from Henry IV could be referenced in a political cartoon and everyone would know what the cartoonist meant. Once films came along, his plays were filmed dozens of times, in different generations, in all different methods. Professional and amateur theaters still do Shakespeare regularly.

4

Of the recent Great HBO Shows, The Sopranos wasn’t the absolute best (The Wire or Deadwood, both notably less popular) but it was very good, very groundbreaking, etc. And everybody and his grandmother watched it. My parents watched it.

5

On that note The Godfather and The Godfather Part II as well. Film snobs, 97-year old Uncle Guido, moms everywhere and the rest of the world all agree, they’re great movies.

For that matter, so are Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Dark Knight and plenty of other blockbusters.

6

Prints of things like “Starry Starry Night” and “the Scream.”

7

I’m not sure the Picasso sculpture in downtown Chicago is “great” art, but I remember how Chicagoans howled about it when it was installed, yet now it is pretty universally beloved.

8

Keith Haring’s featureless people and creatures were on EVERYTHING for a while, but I don’t know if that was mostly in the gay world or if it broke out into the mainstream.

9

There are things that were widely popular in their time and have held fast - Dickens is a great example of this as is Shakespere. Dumas.

There are things that have become popular and are great art - though not appreciated by the masses at the time - Impressionist paintings.

There are classics which have always had modest commercial success, they were not the Harry Potter or Charles Dickens of their time, but the aren’t going out of print anytime soon. Wuthering Heights was not a successful book when first published - but will still be taught to my great grandchildren.

10

The first artists that came to mind are The Beatles.

Beethoven, Mozart and many other classical artists first rose to fame due to their relationships with / the patronage of royal courts - same with painters, etc. - so by definition they had achieved sufficient popularity at the time to obtain sponsorship…

If you look at Florence, Italy - everything from the “rivalry” between Michaelangelo and Leonardo for commissions (or their fresco vs. fresco paint-off that has been documented and some drawings remain, but never actually got to happen) - they were the It, Now, Happening Art Guys™ of their day - it was the equivalent of, I dunno, Clapton and Hendrix trying to win over Swinging London - Mike and Leo were, in their ways, celebrities in their spheres, to my knowledge…

11

Thanks for that little flashback to 1988.

Anyone have some Pepto?

12

There’s being wildly popular, and then there’s becoming part of the canon. Since becoming part of the canon carries the implication that what you’re dealing with is quality stuff, that automatically makes it good art that became wildly popular. Now, how you get to be in the canon, that’s an interesting question. I heard a discussion on it on Pacifica years ago and meant to follow up, but never did.

My point being that a lot of things may have been wildly popular in their day, yet are now largely or completely forgotten. And a lot of art may have been considered of high quality, but the way things later shook out, would not be considered so now. Or maybe they would, but somehow we manage never to hear about them.

Most things tend to get lost in the shuffle, unless you happen to be a student of a certain art form of a certain period. When I’m listening to NPR, and something comes on that’s obviously from the early- to mid-classical period, the only question is, is it Mozart or Haydn? Likewise, if I hear something Baroque, the question is, is it Bach, Handel, or Vivaldi? Who made these guys so popular? Why not the other guys? Were the other guys doing better in their own day? I don’t think it took much to be more successful than Bach as a composer in his own day, after all. He was discouraged from composing, he usually had a million other things required of him, he was primarily known as a performer, and he wrote a kind of music that was going out of style. Yet, ever since Mendelsohn did the performance of St. Matthew’s Passion, long after Bach’s death, Bach has just gotten bigger and bigger.

Looking at JK Rowling, one almost has to think that she’ll end up a footnote. She might end up in the same place as Wilkie Collins, if she’s lucky. But who knows?

This is a massively incoherent post, I realize, but maybe there’s something worthwhile in it.

13

The Marx Brothers. W. C. Fields. Charlie Chaplin. Mae West. George Burns & Gracie Allen. Jack Benny.

Vaudeville is both overrated and underrated. Parts of it were as silly as America’s Got Talent. Some talent got lazy and did the same routine for years at time. And some artists survived the horrible winnowing process through sheer talent and became huge and beloved stars.

The Marx Brothers were as big then as any movie comedy star is today. After twenty years of vaudeville they had three hit Broadway shows in the 1920s. (They toured the country with those shows for months at a time in between, always to packed houses.) While still playing on Broadway in Animal Crackers in the evening, they filmed The Coconuts in the afternoon. When their movies took off they made the cover of Time magazine. Though they were in their own specialized category and didn’t cross over to non-genre films the way Fields did, they were still considered as big movie stars as Clark Gable and Jean Harlow.

Were they good? Up until the point they got too old and their writers didn’t support them properly, they made some of the best humor in the history of movies, Broadway, and vaudeville.

Not bad for grade-school drop-outs.

14

Sort of an odd one - the book Dhalgren by Samuel Delany sold over a million copies. It’s a gigantic, sprawling, deeply structured mess of a SF novel. Highly ambitious and a tough read, it’s mind boggling to me how it was so popular.

Reading the wiki on it is reminding me a lot of the book - it’s probably fair to say that it hasn’t aged into the classic that some predicted at the time. It still has quality though, and Delany is a truly talented writer. I have no idea why such an abstruse, difficult novel became a bestseller.

On preview, the poster before me might know the answer. Exapno, why was Dhalgren so popular?

15

The Iliad.

16

Best I can give you is a big solid “because.”

Delany was very popular at the time, certainly. His earlier novels and short stories won a bunch of awards. And Roger Zelazny, whom he was often compared to, also became extremely popular at the time. Print science fiction generally and the “new wave” approach that Delany and Zelazny embodied, was achieving its biggest critical and popular acceptance in the early 1970s, much like romance novels are today. (Note how many of today’s bestsellers are romance novels, almost unthinkable then.)

Dhalgren was the big book that everybody was waiting for in sf. It hit just at the right moment. And that also means just before Star Wars appeared the next year and destroyed the reputation of and the market for erudite print sf. The field never recovered. Dhalgren was one of those flukes of timing that just happen.

17

Thanks Exapno. It’s a unique book, looking back it seems to have been the culmination of SF for Delany. He wrote one more full length SF novel, Stars in my pocket like grains of sand, which is one of my all time favourites, and that was it.

18

Really? I know it was popular, but I thought that, mainly due to the whole splintering of popularity in TV and all that, that quite a lot of people didn’t. I was going to college when it was on and I don’t think I knew one person who watched the show.

19

I was also going to suggest The Beatles - Please Please Me came out 46 years ago, so I think it, and its peers, have stood the test of time.

I think The Simpsons have also stood the test of time and can be regarded as a wildly popular work of art that has many examples of genius.

20

Oh yes, I’ll second the Simpsons.
What about Stephen King? I know he’s done some really abysmal stuff (Bag of Bones, anyone? Blech), but when he’s good, he can be really good. I think if you look at him less as a horror writer and more as just a writer, he comes off better. The stuff he’s doing when he’s trying not so hard to scare us is a lot better. I think most people can agree that the Body or Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption are examples of good writing.