Maybe because the third chapter of the diss is on middlebrow culture, I found the David Brooks piece today a worthy read. His argument: that a pervasive middlebrow culture has vanished. Whereas popular press magazines used to wrestle with abstract painters, existentialist philosophers and theatrical movements, today. As he describes the shift:
Middlebrow culture was killed in the late 50’s and 60’s, and the mortal blows came from opposite directions. The intellectuals launched assaults on what they took to be middlebrow institutions, attacks that are so vicious they take your breath away…
At the same time, pop culture changed. It was no longer character-oriented; it was personality-oriented. Readers felt less of a need to go outside themselves to absorb works of art as a means of self-improvement…
As a result, we are spared some of the plodding gentility that marked middlebrow culture. But on the other hand, serious culture matters less now than it did then, and artists and intellectuals have less authority.
Amanda at Pandagon — who otherwise makes the excellent point that Brooks may be overstating the shift, that we in fact have a vibrant middlebrow today — misreads these paragraphs as an argument that the nefarious liberal elite is the problem for everything. But Brooks is right: by the 1960s, a highbrow critique of the middlebrow really took hold, and was matched by changes "from below," even if I’m not sure that personality-oriented pop culture is exactly what’s at stake. I’m still trying to figure out why middlebrow sensibility faced a decline. At least in my dissertation, I have a tentative answer for the social problem film (middlebrow genre exemplar): its decline in the 1960s had everything to do with a breakup in the alliance of highbrow and middlebrow audience segments. Highbrows happy in the 1940s to champion films about anti-Semitism or alcohol abuse in the in the 1960s preferred Antonioni, Jack Smith, or, eventually, Robert Altman. What happened to the middlebrows themselves I’d like a better picture of. And that includes more reflection on changes in the underlying class structure in the U.S. than Brooks provides (it is a 750 word op-ed after all).
Also, just as I’d wish for a more Marxist explanation of middlebrow’s decline, I take issue with Brook’s characterization of middlebrow as dating to Emerson. Rather, middlebrow culture in any meaningful fashion (it’s more than simply leisure, it’s a middle category involving the reverential but flawed aping of highbrow markers of culture) doesn’t emerge until the end of the 1800s, as the changes of managerial-industrial capitalism overturn the static class structure of the nineteenth century and bring into a being a new professional-managerial class. Particularly by the turn of the century and start of the twentieth, this new class finds expression in mass-market magazines and mass-produced culture (books, lithographs, etc.). Undoubtedly, the middlebrow comes to define the postwar U.S. moment because of two complementary class transformations: a) the corporate managerial class (as opposed to the rentier or proprietor classes) finally gains hegemony of the bourgeoisie, instilling it with its values; and b) the growth of other white collar jobs, by mid-century, was substantial in number and proportion.
But beyond my historical quibbles with Brooks, I tend to share his assessment of the issue (his thesis is not as dumb as the knee-jerk responses at Pandagon would suggest), and his conflicted feelings about middlebrow culture itself.
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