High Culture Meets Low Culture in a Mass-Media World

It was only 50 or so years ago that critics and intellectuals were busy constructing -- and redrawing, and shoring up -- hierarchies about what kinds of culture were good for us and which ones were bad. Literary man Dwight Macdonald wrote a famous essay about “Masscult and Midcult" -- both, he said, were degrading real, traditional High Culture. Art critic Clement Greenberg, in an influential essay about modern painting, looked at “Avant- garde and Kitsch," championing the former as essential to the human spirit and denouncing the latter as tinder for a fascist revolution. But judging from my recent conversations with a handful of literary and intellectual types -- the heirs, you could say, to the Macdonald/Greenberg tradition -- we live, today, in a pleasingly hierarchy-free, almost utopian cultural world. Most people I know share my disparate taste, enjoying “ South Park" alongside Franz Schubert, the crisply plotted novels of James M. Cain as well as the philosophically searching films of Antonioni.

Do guilt or shame still play a role in shaping people's taste? The answer was a unanimous “no." What I found instead when I asked my posse what culture they were consuming this summer was a sense of good feeling, an expectation of openness -- a lack of angst all around. (Writer Michael Chabon even said he hates the very phrase “guilty pleasure.")

“My reading in general is kind of heavy and pretentious," said New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross, who favors modernist literary masterpieces. “But when I go to the movies, I love to see bloated Hollywood blockbusters. I never worry too much about the category that those experiences fall into."