Neil Gaiman, from his blog entry today.
I’ve never been convinced that there’s any meaningful division between high culture and pop culture — I think there’s good stuff out there, and there’s stuff that’s not much good, and that Sturgeon’s Law applies to high culture and popular culture: 90% of it will be crap, which means that 10% of it will be amazing.
I’d probably add a few fillips to it — “good” and “bad” stuff is largely (I’m tempted to say wholly) subjective, driven by individual and cultural tastes. There is nothing in the way of culture/lit that everyone will agree is good or bad, crap or amazing — if you get more than 70% of the population voting one way or the other (even factoring in age), you’re probably doing something astonishing (and it’s probably something I won’t agree with).
But as Neil points out, that’s true for high culture and popular culture, and that subjectivity leads to a lot of bleed-over between the two, such that it’s hard to actually draw a bright line. Most people who do so are drawing a line between “stuff I like and respect and am pleased to tell people that I admire” and “stuff I dislike, or think doesn’t reflect well on me, so even if I do like it I’m going to, at best, label it as a guilty pleasure.”