Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [9]
Masscult is bad in a new way: it doesn’t even have the theoretical possibility of being good. Up to the eighteenth century, bad art was of the same nature as good art, produced for the same audience, accepting the same standards. The difference was simply one of individual talent. But Masscult is something else. It is not just unsuccessful art. It is non-art. It is even anti-art.
There is a novel of the masses but no Stendhal of the masses; a music for the masses but no Bach or Beethoven, whatever people say...[André Malraux observes in “Art, Popular Art and the Illusion of the Folk”—(Partisan Review, September-October, 1951).] It is odd that no word...designates the common character of what we call, separately, bad painting, bad architecture, bad music, etc. The word “painting” only designates a domain in which art is possible....Perhaps we have only one word because bad painting has not existed for very long. There is no bad Gothic painting. Not that all Gothic painting is good. But the difference that separates Giotto from the most mediocre of his imitators is not of the same kind as that which separates Renoir from the caricaturists of La Vie Parisienne....Giotto and the Gaddi are separated by talent, Degas and Bonnat by a schism, Renoir and “suggestive” painting by what? By the fact that this last, totally subjected to the spectator, is a form of advertising which aims at selling itself. If there exists only one word...it is because there was a time when the distinction between them had no point. Instruments played real music then, for there was no other.
But now we have pianos playing Rock ’n Roll and les sang-lots longs des violons accompanying torch singers.
Masscult offers its customers neither an emotional catharsis nor an aesthetic experience, for these demand effort. The production line grinds out a uniform product whose humble aim is not even entertainment, for this too implies life and hence effort, but merely distraction. It may be stimulating or narcotic, but it must be easy to assimilate. It asks nothing of its audience, for it is “totally subjected to the spectator.” And it gives nothing.[1]
Some of its producers are able enough. Norman Rockwell is technically skilled, as was Meissonier—though Degas was right when he summed up the cavalry charge in Friedland, 1806: “Everything is steel except the breast-plates.” O. Henry could tell a story better than many contributors to our Little Magazines. But a work of High Culture, however inept, is an expression of feelings, ideas, tastes, visions that are idiosyncratic and the audience similarly responds to them as individuals. Furthermore, both creator and audience accept certain standards. These may be more or less traditional; sometimes they are so much less so as to be revolutionary, though Picasso, Joyce and Stravinsky knew and respected past achievements more than did their academic contemporaries; their works may be seen as a heroic breakthrough to earlier, sounder foundations that had been obscured by the fashionable gimcrackery of the academies. But Masscult is indifferent to standards. Nor is there any communication between individuals. Those who consume Masscult might as well be eating ice-cream sodas, while those who fabricate it are no more expressing themselves than are the “stylists” who design the latest atrocity from Detroit.
The difference appears if we compare two famous writers of detective stories, Mr. Erle Stanley Gardner and Mr. Edgar Allan Poe. It is impossible to find any personal note in Mr. Gardner’s enormous output—he has just celebrated his centenary, the hundredth novel under his own name (he also has knocked off several dozen under pseudonyms). His prose style varies between the incompetent and