found the Beats intellectually bankrupt and politically incoherent. And back then, “serious” was the benchmark of high praise. Among the intellectuals, for example, “there was a feeling the Beats were not serious,” Menand said. “The ’50s really was a period when to be a highbrow meant that you had to really have problems with middlebrow and lowbrow and commercial culture,” said Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker who is writing a cultural history of the cold war. At the same time, the distinction between artistic achievement and commercial success, which American intellectuals had long assumed to be mutually exclusive, was losing its hold.įrom their redoubts at “little magazines” like Partisan Review and Commentary - whose cultural authority far surpassed their low circulation - writers like Leslie Fiedler, Dwight Macdonald, Norman Podhoretz and Lionel Trilling were trying, in their different ways, to preserve the idea of serious literature against the rising tide of mass culture. It’s hard to generalize about any historical moment, but in the intellectual journals of the era, some central themes emerge: a debate over the merits of the Beat movement, and the attempt by some influential critics to preserve the quickly dissolving distinctions among highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow culture that had previously held sway. Join Michael Krasny and guests as they take a look at the changes in culture and class: High-brow, Low-brow or No-brow?.on the Next Talk of the Nation for NPR News.From Rachel Donadio's back page essay, "1958: The War of the Intellectuals":
Lowbrow vs highbrow professional#
But lately, it's getting harder to distinguish one from the other as professional wrestlers become governors, Michael Graves makes high priced teapots for Target, and Metallica dabbles in symphonic music.
In America, where equality is the ideal, people don't like to talk about class distinctions, but they love to show it.
Watching television and mainstream movies, and listening to top 40 hits was considered more common, a kind of cultural slumming. 2000) LAWRENCE LEVINE *Margaret Byrne Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley *Professor of History at George Mason University It used to be that reading poetry, going to the opera, or attending art galleries meant you were part of the cultural elite. GUESTS: JOHN SEABROOK *Staff Writer at the New Yorker *Author, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture (Forthcoming, Knopf, Feb. Join Michael Krasny and guests as they take a look at the changes in culture and class: High-brow, Low-brow or No-brow?.on the Next Talk of the Nation for NPR News. Highbrow, Lowbrow, or Nobrow? GUESTS: JOHN SEABROOK *Staff Writer at the New Yorker *Author, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture (Forthcoming, Knopf, Feb.
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