`Dumbing down" has become shorthand for a miscellany of alleged failings, but central to the argument is the battle between the traditional arts and popular culture, between art as a pursuit fully appreciated only by a select band of initiates and culture as an expression and reflection of the talents of a very large number of people. This is more often to do with the subject than with the treatment of the subject: ie, all symphonies worthwhile, all pop music pap. It reaches a higher lunacy when otherwise unremarkable people declare that they do not watch television (fair enough) but in terms that make it clear that they are thereby awarding themselves a first-class honours degree. Theatre good, television bad.
I am about to launch the 24th season of The South Bank Show, which will again include documentaries on what are often classified as high and low art, on classical and common - even vulgar - subjects. As I look through the list, I believe that the old distinctions are not only less and less relevant to what is actually going on, but increasingly the refuge of the merely snobbish - a champagne-and-canape view of the arts.
Perhaps the root of the trouble is that popular culture was taken seriously in the 20th century by many of its creators and by intelligent and committed commentators. What the 20th century delivered to popular culture was a ticket to posterity. Films, records, CDs, television and tapes could preserve work that in previous centuries had been snuffed out. It put popular culture on a par with the traditional forms, which had long ago found ways to perpetuate themselves.
Popular culture was and is the long-overdue arrival of the masses - and that is part of the trouble. Established culture has never liked the masses, and established culture in Britain became hopelessly entangled in the class system, the control system - various systems of exclusion that are sometimes only distantly related to an appreciation of the arts themselves.
To make matters worse, the 20th century's popular culture - in films and pop music alone - threw up an enormous number of highly talented writers, performers, directors and musicians, with an innovative energy that could make traditional forms seem staid. The fact that successive generations were far more likely to be enchanted by the new popular arts, such as cinema, than the historic, such as theatre, caused and still causes anxiety. This reaches absurdity as senior citizens of our official culture take it on themselves to expel whole activities such as films and rock music from the canon of what should be considered The Arts.
I hope it goes without saying that great art continued to flow from traditional sources throughout the last century. In the long run the established forms may prove to have outshone the new. But popular culture must now be reckoned with.
One of the questions it raises is this: how are we to judge what more powerfully influences us and, hence, what is stronger or better? See Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron, Madam Butterfly, Phantom of the Opera or Elvis Presley at Las Vegas, and how do we set about judging differences? The cultural diktat of our day still tells us that Schoenberg is superior to Presley; many people go along with that. But is this any more than obedience to hierarchies laid down before popular culture gave itself a true chance to be compared?
We hear more and more about the brain, and we were told recently that Mozart is good for you - but is it better for you than Motown? How do we decide this outside subjective experience and - much less reliable - fashion, which plays such a colossal part in appreciation of the arts? Puccini and Andrew Lloyd-Webber are interesting in another way: both can appeal to mass audiences and also to those who have taken the trouble to become connoisseurs, and they can do so in the same piece of music.
Many composers have found great satisfaction in using their best skills for mass audiences - Aaron Copland is a useful example. Do we get less out of his score for the film Of Mice and Men than we do out of his concert music? And, returning to Presley, those early songs bear a great deal of repetition - every bit as much as Schoenberg, and to more people. So the accepted notion that art is partly that which endures and bears retelling and reexamining holds as much for Elvis as it does for Moses and Aaron.
But, the argument goes, there is an altogether different quality of experience between listening to Beethoven and listening to the Beatles. Different? Granted. Quality? That's difficult. There are times when Beethoven takes you into his music so overwhelmingly that you feel your skin will burst with the sound inside your body. Yet listening to or, better, listening and dancing to the Beatles can provoke a not dissimilar ecstasy.
One danger in this argument for the old guard is that it undermines exclusivity. If just anyone can reach peaks of musical pleasure - through pop - where does that leave the vital pecking order (vital, that is, for centuries in societies that saw and often still see high art as primarily a social badge of honour)?
There is the important argument of difficulty and complication. Surely Wagner is more difficult than Van Morrison. You need to know more to enjoy more, and from that discipline of learning flow benefits that are simply not available otherwise. There is truth in that. But is difficulty itself a virtue? Finnegans Wake is very complicated but it is not a patch on the simple-seeming Dubliners. Yeats's simplest poems are among his greatest. Self-consciously difficult pop music is very often dire. As importantly, is Van Morrison easy? Which contemporary Faber poet could write successful song lyrics?
There is a rooted assumption that popular culture is easy, especially popular music. Millions who try and fail to create it find out the hard way that it is just that - hard. A simple test is to consider the doomed attempts of our greatest living operatic tenors to sing popular tunes. Almost always they are not just poor, but terrible. They can't swing, they have no rhythm. They are afraid to leave the notes on the page; that magnificent growth in the throat gets in the way all the time. Pavarotti could never sing like Presley because he has neither the talent nor the training. Nureyev, although he longed to, could never dance like Fred Astaire.
To prefer Placido Domingo to Robbie Williams or vice versa is easy, and what we all do. To try to prove that preference is likely to be very tricky. And, once again, there are figures dancing across the landscape - Leonard Bernstein is one example, David Hockney another - who cut across entrenched positions and make a mockery of them. We face this head on every year when putting together a new season of The South Bank Show. From its inception I thought we should tackle popular music (Blur was the latest) with the same resources and ambitions as we brought to classical music (Simon Rattle the latest); take television drama (Jimmy McGovern) as seriously as theatre (Pinter); explore high-definition performers of comedy (Billy Connolly) as well as virtuosi of the concert platform (Cecilia Bartoli); study thriller writers (Walter Moseley) as well as the more accepted literary figures (Martin Amis). We could reach even wider in our attempt to take on the real world of culture in which balances and powers are changing excitingly and rapidly.
A friend suggested to me at this year's Edinburgh festival that some of The South Bank Show's most popular editions - Michael Flatley, Cher, Dawn French - did so well in the ratings that I ought to spin them off into a separate strand and have another strand for Simon Rattle, John Tavener, Harold Pinter. All of the latter were excellent programmes, I think, and scored a respectable million or so viewers. But there was a big gap between them and the popular programmes.
My belief is that if we had split in that way, we would have given in. We would have given in to those who desperately want the world to go back to the days when culture was a posh voice and being seen was as important as seeing. That would be dumbing down.
The new series of The South Bank Show starts on ITV on October 1st.