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from enjoying what they enjoy or admiring what they admire. He was not a prude. His business was getting people to realize that they were often not actually enjoying, or otherwise benefiting from, the cultural goods that they had been persuaded to patronize. His attacks on James Gould Cozzens and Colin Wilson, his roasting of Mortimer Adler and the Books-of-the-Millennium Club, his disembowelment of Norman Cousins’s Saturday Review, and even his potshots at the Big Issue books were directed as much at the literary establishment as they were at buyers and readers. Macdonald thought that people were being tricked into purchasing these goods by being told that they ought to like them, or that the stuff was good for them. Just like kitsch, Midcult was a marketing phenomenon. It was culture manufactured for the aspiring sophisticate.

In the case of kitsch, no one was being fooled. Lowbrow culture was produced in order to make a profit, and it was purchased in order to provide simple pleasure and diversion. What alarmed Macdonald was that in the case of what he called Midcult, everyone seemed to be fooled—not only the readers but the writers, the editors, the publishers, and the reviewers. They had all become convinced of their own virtuous high-mindedness. They believed that they were engaged in an uplifting enterprise of human betterment—even as they raked in the profits. (As Macdonald pointed out, after eight years, the Adler Great Books set had grossed twenty-two million dollars.) “No promotion” was their means of promotion, and readers who aspired to something superior to simple pleasure and diversion fell for it.

It all seems to have provoked Macdonald’s lifelong hatred of bogus authority. He saw it as a form of moral and intellectual bullying, and a dislike of bullies was part of his pacifism and anarchism. “Clem has many of the aspects of the old-fashioned con man,” he once said of Greenberg in an interview. “I never knew that he knew anything about art and I’m not sure that he did know anything about art. But he had something that was very important: a moralistic approach to everything. He made people feel guilty if they didn’t like Jackson Pollock.” This was unfair to Greenberg, who was a genuine critic. And it was unfair to Pollock and to abstract expressionism, a style of painting that Macdonald never appreciated. (“Enormous globs and gloobs,” he described it in the introduction to Against the American Grain.) But it suggests the remorselessness of Macdonald’s commitment to exposing the self-promotion, self-satisfaction, and self-delusion that are always wrapped up in the business of making and appreciating art. That exposure is one of the foundational tasks of criticism, and Macdonald is one of its great exemplars.

—LOUIS MENAND

Masscult and Midcult

For about two centuries Western culture has in fact been two cultures: the traditional kind—let us call it High Culture—that is chronicled in the textbooks, and a novel kind that is manufactured for the market. This latter may be called Mass Culture, or better Masscult, since it really isn’t culture at all. Masscult is a parody of High Culture. In the older forms, its artisans have long been at work. In the novel, the line stretches from the eighteenth-century “servant-girl romances” to Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst and such current ephemera as Burdick, Drury, Michener, Ruark and Uris; in music, from Hearts and Flowers to Rock ’n Roll; in art, from the chromo to Norman Rockwell; in architecture, from Victorian Gothic to ranch-house moderne; in thought, from Martin Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy (“Marry not without means, for so shouldst thou tempt Providence;/But wait not for more than enough, for marriage is the DUTY of most men.”) to Norman Vincent Peale. (Thinkers like H.G. Wells, Stuart Chase, and Max Lerner come under the head of Midcult rather than Masscult.) And the enormous output of such new media as the radio, television and the movies is almost entirely Masscult.

I

This is something new in history. It is not that so much bad art is being produced.