Popular culture is often treated as the noisy younger sibling of the fine arts, yet from the penny press to the meme it has been where most people first fall in love with stories, images and songs.

Ask someone to define pop culture and you will usually get a list rather than a definition. Superhero films, chart music, video games, viral dances, the shows everyone is streaming this month. Ask them to define high culture and you get another list. Opera, oil painting, the symphony, the literary novel. The two lists feel natural, almost eternal, as if a velvet rope had always separated the gallery from the arcade. The truth is stranger and far more interesting. Pop culture simply means the culture of the many, the art and entertainment made to be enjoyed widely rather than studied narrowly, and the border between it and so-called high culture has never stopped moving. Shakespeare wrote for groundlings who paid a penny to stand in the mud of the Globe. In nineteenth-century America, as the historian Lawrence Levine showed, opera arias were whistled in the street and Shakespeare shared the bill with acrobats. Much of what we now guard as high art began its life as somebody’s guilty pleasure.

Penny papers, dime novels and the music hall

Popular culture in its modern sense begins with cheap print. In 1833 a New York printer named Benjamin Day launched the Sun and sold it for one cent at a time when rival papers cost six. Suddenly a newspaper was something a dock worker could buy with pocket change, and Day filled it accordingly, with crime, scandal, human oddity and the occasional outright hoax. The penny press created the first truly mass audience, and publishers quickly found other things to sell it. From 1860 the firm of Beadle and Company issued dime novels, small orange-wrapped adventures about frontiersmen, detectives and outlaws that sold in the hundreds of thousands. Critics called them trash. Readers called them Tuesday.

What print did for the eye, the stage did for the whole crowd. London’s music halls, beginning with Charles Morton’s Canterbury Hall in 1852, grew out of pub sing-alongs into glittering palaces of comic songs and sentimental ballads, cousins of the Parisian café-concert across the Channel. In the United States the same energy became vaudeville, the touring variety circuit that impresarios like Tony Pastor and B. F. Keith scrubbed clean enough for families and ran like a national railway of entertainment. A single vaudeville bill might hold a juggler, a soprano, a comedian and a trained dog act, and it played to shopgirls and bankers in the same house. It was democratic, commercial, disreputable and beloved, which is to say it was pop culture, fully formed.

Cinema, radio and the box in the corner

Then the machines arrived. In 1905 a Pittsburgh storefront theatre called the Nickelodeon began showing short films all day for five cents, and within a few years thousands of imitators had opened across the country. The movies inherited vaudeville’s audience and then dwarfed it, and the early masters of the form, from the trick-film pioneer Georges Méliès to Chaplin and Keaton, proved that art could be made for everyone at once. Radio followed. When Pittsburgh’s KDKA broadcast the presidential election returns in November 1920, it inaugurated a medium that would soon put the same voices, the same serials and the same songs into millions of living rooms simultaneously. When Orson Welles dramatised The War of the Worlds in 1938, the panic it supposedly caused was largely a newspaper legend, but the legend itself revealed how completely broadcasting had entered the national bloodstream.

Television finished what radio began. In January 1953, more Americans watched Lucille Ball’s fictional character give birth on I Love Lucy than watched President Eisenhower’s inauguration the following day. For roughly three decades the whole country sat down in front of the same handful of channels each evening, and the shared experience that resulted, the water-cooler conversation, the catchphrase everyone knew, became the very texture of common life. Whatever one thinks of the programmes, no cathedral, court or academy had ever gathered so many people around the same stories at the same time.

From rock and roll to hip hop

Music tells the same story at a higher volume. The screaming crowds were there before the guitars. In 1944 thousands of bobby-soxers besieged the Paramount Theatre in New York for a skinny singer from Hoboken named Frank Sinatra, and the modern pop idol was born a decade before anyone said rock and roll. When Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1956, and when the Beatles followed on the same stage in February 1964 before an estimated seventy-three million viewers, broadcast television and popular music fused into a single cultural engine. Rock carried with it everything the arbiters of taste distrusted, youth, noise, race, sex and money, and it remade the century’s soundtrack anyway.

Hip hop began even further from the centres of official culture. On an August night in 1973, an eighteen-year-old Jamaican-born DJ known as Kool Herc played the drum breaks of funk records back to back at his sister’s party in the recreation room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and a form built from turntables, rhymes, dance and spray paint grew out of neighbourhoods that had been written off entirely. Half a century later hip hop is the dominant popular music on the planet, studied in universities and honoured with Pulitzers. The pattern repeats so reliably that it is almost a law. The music of the margins becomes the music of the mainstream, and then, given time, the music of the museums.

When the soup can entered the museum

The traffic has never run in one direction, and in the mid twentieth century the fine arts made the return journey. In London in 1956, Richard Hamilton assembled a small collage of advertisements, a bodybuilder, a tin of ham and a television set, and asked in its title just what it was that made modern homes so different, so appealing. The critics around him began speaking of pop art. In New York the idea found its prophets. Andy Warhol, a commercial illustrator from Pittsburgh, exhibited thirty-two paintings of Campbell’s soup cans in Los Angeles in 1962 and went on to silkscreen Marilyn Monroe, Coca-Cola bottles and dollar bills with the deadpan seriousness other painters reserved for saints. Roy Lichtenstein blew up single frames of romance and war comics, Ben-Day dots and all, into canvases the size of altarpieces.

It is easy to misread pop art as a joke at the supermarket’s expense. It was closer to an act of recognition. Warhol and Lichtenstein understood that the imagery of advertising, packaging and comic strips was the shared visual language of their time, the thing that a shopper in Newark and a senator in Washington both recognised instantly, and they treated that language as worthy of the museum’s full attention. In doing so they collapsed a hierarchy that had governed the arts for a century, and the argument they started, about whether the everyday image deserves the frame, has never really ended.

Fandom, video games and the age of the meme

In the decades since, the audience itself has taken over more and more of the stage. Star Trek viewers of the late 1960s did not simply watch their show, they wrote about it, published fan magazines and organised gatherings, and the convention culture they pioneered grew into events like San Diego’s Comic-Con, which began in 1970 with a few hundred attendees and now fills an entire city. Video games, dismissed for years as a toy, grew from Pong and Pac-Man into an industry that by most estimates earns more than global cinema and recorded music combined, and into a form capable of genuine beauty and moral weight. K-pop demonstrated that the flow of popular culture is no longer a one-way export from the West, as Psy’s Gangnam Style became the first video to reach a billion views on YouTube in 2012 and the fan armies of groups like BTS learned to move charts and headlines across continents.

And then there is the meme, the folk art of the internet. The word was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe an idea that spreads like a gene, but the internet made it literal, an image or phrase endlessly copied, altered and passed along, authorless and alive. A meme is pop culture at its most distilled, made by anyone, owned by no one, understood by millions within hours. The critiques of all this deserve a fair hearing. Popular culture is commercial by definition, and what sells is not always what nourishes. Recommendation algorithms, which feed us more of whatever we lingered on last, can flatten taste into a comfortable sameness, and a feed optimised for attention is not optimised for wonder. Neil Postman warned decades ago that a society entertaining itself around the clock risks amusing itself into shallowness, and the smartphone has only sharpened his point. But commercialism and formula are not new charges. They were levelled at the dime novel, the nickelodeon and the seven-inch single too, and each of those managed to produce lasting art all the same.

Yesterday’s pop, tomorrow’s classics

Which brings us back to the moving border. Shakespeare was popular entertainment before he was a syllabus. Dickens published his novels in cheap monthly parts, and the story goes that New York crowds shouted to arriving ships to learn whether Little Nell had died, behaviour we would now call fandom without hesitation. Jazz was denounced from pulpits and editorial pages as a corrupting racket, and it now resides at Lincoln Center and in the canon of America’s greatest gifts to world culture. The pattern is so consistent that today’s disdain for the superhero film, the game or the pop idol should probably be held a little loosely. Somewhere in the noise of the present, the classics of the next century are already circulating, unrecognised because they are everywhere.

That is the real answer to the question in our title. Pop culture is not a lesser category of culture, it is culture as most people actually live it, the place where a child first hears a melody that will not let go, first follows a story past bedtime, first discovers that an image can mean something. The velvet rope is a late invention and a movable one. What endures is the older truth that art has always sought the largest room it can find, whether that room is the pit of the Globe, the balcony of a vaudeville house, a Bronx rec room or a glowing screen held in one hand.