Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [43]
Since he was at heart a serious man, his lyrics were rarely clever. Instead of turning facetious phrases he made a studious attempt to write idiomatically in the popular tradition of the musical theatre, for he was a dedicated craftsman. But the style that was apparently so artless has brought glimpses of glory into our lives. “There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow,” sings Curly in Oklahoma! and the gritty streets of a slatternly city look fresher. “June is bustin’ out all over,” sing Carrie and Nettie in Carousel and the harshness of our winter vanishes....To us it is gratifying that he had the character to use his genius with faith and scruple.
The contrast of faith (good) with cleverness (bad) is typical of Midcult, as is the acceptance of liberalistic moralizing as a satisfactory substitute for talent. Indeed, talent makes the midbrow uneasy: “Since he was a serious man, his lyrics were rarely clever.” The death of Mr. Hart did not stimulate the Times to editorial elegy.
[11]The Midcult mind aspires toward Universality above all. A good example was that “Family of Man” show of photographs Edward Steichen put on several years ago at the Museum of Modern Art to great applause. (The following summer it was the hit of the American exhibition in Moscow, showing that a touch of Midcult makes the whole world kin.) The title was typical—actually, it should have been called Photorama. There were many excellent photographs, but they were arranged under the most pretentious and idiotic titles—each section had a wall caption from Whitman, Emerson, Carl Sandburg or some other sage—and the whole effect was of a specially pompous issue of Life (“Life on Life”). The editorializing was insistent—the Midcult audience always wants to be Told—and the photographs were marshaled to demonstrate that although there are real Problems (death, for instance), it’s a pretty good old world after all.
[12]A typical Academic victory over the avant-garde was that by the “Beaux Arts” school of architecture, led by McKim, Mead & White, over the Chicago school, led by Louis Sullivan and including Frank Lloyd Wright, at the turn of the century. A stroll down Park Avenue illustrates the three styles. Academic: The Italian loggia of the Racquet & Tennis Club, the Corinthian extravagances of Whitney Warren’s Grand Central Building. Avant-garde: the Seagram Building, by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, and the Lever Building, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Midcult: the glass boxes—imitating as cheaply as possible the Lever and Seagram buildings—that are going up as fast as the old Academic-Renaissance apartment houses can be pulled down. One can hardly regret the destruction of the latter on either aesthetic or antiquarian grounds, but they did have a mild kind of “character” which their Midcult successors lack.
[13]Although the two are often confused, it is one thing to bring High Culture to a wider audience without change; and another to “popularize” it by sales talk in the manner of Clifton Fadiman or Mortimer J. Adler, or by pastiches like J.B. and John Brown’s Body, or by hoking it up as in Stokowski’s lifelong struggle to assimilate Bach to Tchaikowsky or those Stratford, Connecticut, productions of Shakespeare, which surpass those of Stratford, England in showmanship as much as they fall short of them in style and intelligence.
[14]Actually, I can think why the young men are angry. The Enemy looks very different from there than from here. From there, it is too little democracy; from here, too much. They see cultural lines as relics of a snobbish past, I see them as dikes against the corruption of Masscult and Midcult. They see standards as inhibiting. I see them as defining. They see tradition as deadening. I see it as nourishing. It may be that, as an American, I idealize the British situation. But I hope not as