Thursday, January 05, 2012

How fares it now?

... Dwight’s Dream | The Weekly Standard.

... for Macdonald, “the real enemy,” writes Menand, “was the literature, music, theater, art, and criticism of middle-class high-mindedness.” These productions broke down the wall between high and low and created the third category: “a debased form of High Culture,” neither High nor Low, that Macdonald called Midcult. In Menand’s phrase, it was “the culture of middlebrow aspiration.” He took it as an affront. In Midcult, Macdonald wrote, “everything becomes a commodity, to be mined for $$, used for something it is not, from Davy Crockett to Picasso. .  .  . [It is] a corruption of High Culture which .  .  . is able to pass itself off as the real thing.”

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