Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [32]
Here are what I believe to be essential conditions for the growth and for the survival of culture. If they conflict with any passionate faith of the reader—if, for instance, he finds it shocking that culture and equalitarianism should conflict, if it seems monstrous to him that anyone should have “advantages of birth”—I do not ask him to change his faith. I merely ask him to stop paying lip-service to culture. If the reader says: “The state of affairs which I wish to bring about is right (or is just, or is inevitable); and if this must lead to further deterioration of culture, we must accept that deterioration”—then I can have no quarrel with him. I might even, in some circumstances, feel obliged to support him. The effect of such a wave of honesty would be that the word culture would cease to be absurd.
That the word now is absurd—priggish, unctuous, worn slick with abuse—shows how mass-ified we have become. The great cultures of the past have all been elite affairs, centering in small upper-class communities which had certain standards in common and which both encouraged creativity by (informed) enthusiasm and disciplined it by (informed) criticism.
The old avant-garde of 1870–1930, from Rimbaud to Picasso, demonstrated this with special clarity because it was based not on wealth or birth but on common tastes. “Common” didn’t mean uniform—there were the liveliest, most painful clashes—but rather a shared respect for certain standards and an agreement that living art often runs counter to generally accepted ideas. The attitude of the old avant-garde, in short, was a peculiar mixture of conservatism and revolutionism that had nothing in common with the tepid agreeableness of Masscult. It was an elite community, a rather snobbish one, but anyone could join who cared enough about such odd things. Its significance was that it simply refused to compete in the established cultural marketplaces. It made a desperate effort to fence off some area within which the serious artist could still function, to erect again the barriers between the cognoscenti and the ignoscenti that had been breached by the rise of Masscult. The attempt was against the whole movement of history; and our cultural sociologists, had they been anachronistically consulted by Yeats or Stravinsky, could have proved to them with irrefutable tables and research studies that it could not possibly come to anything. For it was, sociologically speaking, absurd. Nevertheless, the attempt did in fact succeed, perhaps because artists, writers and musicians are not very good at statistics—and to it we owe most of the major creations of the last seventy years.
The old avant-garde has passed and left no successors. We continue to live off its capital but the community has broken up and the standards are no longer respected. The crisis in America is especially severe. Our creators are too isolated or too integrated. Most of them merge gracefully into Midcult, feeling they must be part of “the life of our time,” whatever that means (I should think it would be ambitious enough to try to be part of one’s own life), and fearful of being accused of snobbishness, cliqueism, negativism or, worst of all, practicing “art for art’s sake” (though for what better sake?). Some revolt, but their work tends toward eccentricity since it lacks contact with the past and doesn’t get support from a broad enough intelligentsia in the present. The two currently most prominent groups, the “action painters” and the beatnik academy of letters, differ from the old avant-garde in two interesting ways. They are cut off from tradition: the works of Joyce and Picasso, for instance, show an extraordinary knowledge of (and feeling for) the achievements of the past, while those of the beats and the actionists, for instance, do not. And they have had too much publicity too soon; the more they try to shock the Midcult’s audience, the more they are