Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [41]
This is the essence of what I have tried to say.
[1]“Distraction is bound to the present mode of production, to the rationalized and mechanized process of labor to which...the masses are subject....People want to have fun. A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is possible only to those whose lives do not put such a strain on them that in their spare time they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously. The whole sphere of cheap commercial entertainment reflects this dual desire.”—T.W. Adorno: On Popular Music.
[2]The advertisements provide even more scope for the editors’ homogenizing talents, as when a full-page photo of a ragged Bolivian peon grinningly drunk on cocoa leaves (which Mr. Luce’s conscientious reporters tell us he chews to narcotize his chronic hunger pains) appears opposite an ad of a pretty, smiling, well-dressed American mother with her two pretty, smiling, well-dressed children (a boy and a girl, of course—children are always homogenized in our ads) looking raptly at a clown on a TV set, the whole captioned in type big enough to announce the Second Coming: rca victor brings you a new kind of television—super sets with “picture power.” The peon would doubtless find the juxtaposition piquant if he could afford a copy of Life, which, luckily for the Good Neighbor Policy, he cannot.
[3]And if it was often influenced by High Culture, it did change the forms and themes into its own style. The only major form of Folk Art that still persists in this country is jazz, and the difference between Folk Art and Masscult may be most readily perceived by comparing the kind of thing heard at the annual Newport Jazz Festivals to Rock ’n Roll. The former is musically interesting and emotionally real; the latter is—not. The amazing survival of jazz despite the exploitative onslaughts of half a century of commercial entrepreneurs, is in my opinion, due to its folk quality. And as the noble and the peasant understood each other better than either understood the bourgeois, so it seems significant that jazz is the only art form that appeals to both the intelligentsia and the common people. As for the others, let them listen to South Pacific.
[4]For this quote and for most of the material in this and the next paragraph, I am indebted to one of Leo Lowenthal’s several interesting studies in Masscult, “The Debate over Art and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England” (written in collaboration with Marjorie Fiske), which appears in a volume unpromisingly titled Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (Free Press, 1951). Q.D. Leavis, in her Fiction and the Reading Public (Chatto & Windus, 1932), still the best book on the deterioration of standards as a result of the rise of the mass public, puts the turning point about a century later. The precise dating of a great historical change like this is, of course, a matter of opinion. I think Mrs. Leavis’ book exaggerates the solid merits of the pre-1830 popular novels and journalism. But we can all agree on the main point—the effects of the mass market on literature.
[5]Another possibility is that every editor and publisher is daily buried under such an avalanche of nonsense that he loses his bearings. As anyone who has ever taught a course in “creative writing” knows, it is a democratic right of every freeborn American to be a “writer.” The obliteration of standards in the Masscult world is nowhere shown more clearly than in this innocent conviction. In the year 1956, for example, the Ladies Home Journal received 21,822 unsolicited