![]() Ross is fond of a scene that begins Lawrence Levine’s “Highbrow / Lowbrow,” which describes Shakespeare performances on the 19th century American frontier. “Many of the more interesting artists today, from a Salman Rushdie to a Sigur Ros, blur the distinctions in all kinds of ways ‘til we don’t know, exhilaratingly, if we’re being elevated or entertained.” “To me, high and low, guilt and innocence, masscult and midcult are as out of date now as East and West and old and new,” said Iyer, who thinks globalism and the Internet have shuffled all the decks. Pico Iyer, the eminent Japan-and-California-based travel writer, told me: “One highlight of recent summers for me was ‘Nacho Libre’ I saw it in a packed house on opening night and subsequently hurried to see it again, so carried away was I by Jack Black’s impromptu hymn.” Like a true 21st century man, Iyer likes to mix it up: This summer, his favorite has been “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a grim Romanian art-house film (now on DVD) unlikely to be remade with Jack Black. “I like to see popcorn movies in the theater.” ![]() “I’ll probably go see ‘Hellboy II,’ ” said the unimpeachably smart Salon book critic Laura Miller. I never worry too much about the category that those experiences fall into.” “But when I go to the movies, I love to see bloated Hollywood blockbusters. “My reading in general is kind of heavy and pretentious,” said New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross, who favors modernist literary masterpieces. (Writer Michael Chabon, whom I interview on Page F9, even said he hates the very phrase “guilty pleasure.”) Cain as well as the philosophically searching films of Antonioni.ĭo guilt or shame still play a role in shaping people’s taste? The answer was a unanimous “no.” What I found instead when I asked my posse what culture they were consuming this summer was a sense of good feeling, an expectation of openness - a lack of angst all around. Most people I know share my disparate taste, enjoying “South Park” alongside Franz Schubert, the crisply plotted novels of James M. ![]() ¶ But judging from my recent conversations with a handful of literary and intellectual types - the heirs, you could say, to the Macdonald/Greenberg tradition - we live, today, in a pleasingly hierarchy-free, almost utopian cultural world. Art critic Clement Greenberg, in an influential essay about modern painting, looked at “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” championing the former as essential to the human spirit and denouncing the latter as tinder for a fascist revolution. ¶ Literary man Dwight Macdonald wrote a famous essay about “Masscult and Midcult” - both, he said, were degrading real, traditional High Culture. She can be reached at or 73.It was only 50 or so years ago that critics and intellectuals were busy constructing - and redrawing, and shoring up - hierarchies about what kinds of culture were good for us and which ones were bad. McMurray-Helen Bennett Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Monmouth University, Dr. Lowbrow, Middlebrow, Highbrow and Ink and Electricity are sponsored by the Wayne D. But following the second talk in the series by Skidmore College professor Janet Casey in spring 2017 on “Readers as Writers in American Periodicals, 1900-1940,” Monmouth strengthened its claim to being a hub for serious study of popular arts-the arts that have engrossed, thrilled, and delighted readers for over a century. Popular literature like this is often maligned by academics as “lowbrow” or “middlebrow,” while “highbrow” art and literature are supposed to be the stuff of university life. ![]() Macdonald’s talk explored the ways Buchan’s popular novel (which was adapted into a play for radio, stage, and film) impacted society, politics, and even the shape of the British empire. ![]() Focused on the writer of the famous adventure mystery, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Dr. Her talk was titled “The Scots Are Invading: John Buchan’s Version of How Scotland Conquered the World,” and it set the stage for the series talks to follow. In April 2016, Kate Macdonald of the University of Reading delivered the first lecture in a series on cultural hierarchies in the arts and literature. ![]()
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