Mięso kobiet... albo śmiech na sali : o demokratyzacji sfery intymnej w mediach

Abstract

The article makes an attempt to analyse the modern democratization of an intimate life in the media, combining it with the question on its cultural sources and consequences. According to the author, the beginnings of the very process should be looked for in the early avant-garde of the 20th century which overcame an ever-lasting contempt for a popular culture raising its aesthetic tastes to the level of formality in artistic works by Duchamp, Rimbaud, Jasieński, and Picabia. The secularization and democratization of societies after 1905 did the rest, and hence, the popular culture and its authors became both the style dictators and the main audience of the mass culture, fulfilling somehow the assumptions of the avant-garde. A specific quality of the popular/common/plebeian culture has always been equalizing the pressure between the formal and the informal through ritual forms of laughter that included a consecrating, restoring and eliminating aspect of the sphere of a social axiology, overstrained by the public nature of power according to the hoi polloi. The author follows its postmodern characters, especially visible in tabloids, putting forward a hypothesis that its functions were blurred by the mass culture. Because of that, the public mixes up with the private, the formal with the informal, and former forms of laughter, though, exist in the images of a material and bodily hoi polloi, lose their worldview functions, contributing to the loss of transcendent values of culture whom they always served.