Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow - In the Digital Era
The highbrow sensibility, warts and all, is irrelevant enough to be considered dead.
I – Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow in 1947
I’d like to analyze a short article by Russell Lynes originally from 1947 on his exposition of the differences between highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow people. The terms, of course, were floating around before Lynes got to them. They come originally from phrenology, and discussion on them as applied to aesthetic taste was already well-worn by the time Lynes decided to muse about what they mean and how their representatives function in the cultural ecosystem. But the observations he offered are insightful enough to bear repeating now, especially since so many of them have been forgotten.
The essay was originally written to criticize an attack on middlebrow culture that Virgina Woolf had recently made, though later reprints of this essay eliminated references to her and what prompted its composition. Woolf passionately argued that she, a highbrow connoisseur of the arts, loves the lowbrow people but hates the middlebrow, and further argues that their taste and consumption habits give them away. People nowadays will go on social media and rehash Woolf’s claim, believing themselves to be entirely original, not realizing it was already made over 75 years beforehand. I’ve probably done something like this before. But Lynes makes argues that Woolf’s situation is nothing special, and if anything ought to be taken as a given. In fact, love for the lowbrow and hatred of the middlebrow is one of the highbrow’s defining features. As he puts it, “The highbrow’s friend is the lowbrow,” and elsewhere,
The highbrow sees as his real enemy the middlebrow, whom he regards as a pretentious and frivolous man or woman who uses culture to satisfy social or business ambitions; who, to quote Clement Greenberg in Partisan Review, is busy "devaluating the precious, infecting the healthy, corrupting the honest and stultifying the wise." It takes a man who feels strongly to use such harsh words, but the militant highbrow has no patience with his enemies. He is a serious man who will not tolerate frivolity where the arts are concerned. It is part of his function as a highbrow to protect the arts from the culture-mongers, and he spits venom at those he suspects of selling the Muses short.
For Lynes, the highbrows have their heads in the clouds. They believe in aesthetics for their own sake: ars grati artis. Or at least, they believe that they believe this. They thus mostly spend their lives trying to write about the arts in as uncorrupted a manner as possible, refusing to cheapen their craft with paltry concerns such as business or social striving, and they stay away from the popular press. They criticize art in specialized publications and take up positions at the university, and when they’re not criticizing art directly, they’re criticizing the critics. Few actually make art themselves, and few are actually in love with in any one particular work of art. As Lynes notes, they’re interested in broad trends. They’re into the discourse surrounding a work, not so much the work itself.
They emphasize that art shouldn’t be for something. The importance of the arts is presented as a given. So when they look to the lowbrow, they find someone admirable in his innocence. A lowbrow simply “likes what he likes” and doesn’t care to justify it with any pretense, and the highbrow will turn the other way when the lowbrow happens to enjoy something the highbrow doesn’t care for. For instance,
if the lowbrow reads the comics, the highbrow understands; he is frequently a connoisseur of the comics himself. But if he likes grade-B double features, the highbrow blames that on the corrupting influence of the middlebrow moneybags of Hollywood.
In other words, the highbrow, for Lynes, is preoccupied with remaining permanently unmolested by the material considerations that give way to aesthetic pleasures. Is he self-deceived? Yes, in fact, that’s the whole point of Lynes’s essay. But in his self-deception, the highbrow appreciates the lowbrow, who is in his own way also oblivious to these considerations.
It gets interesting, though, when the middlebrow enters the picture. For Lynes, there are two types: upper-middlebrow and lower-middlebrow. The upper-middlebrow is often the business-oriented figure who actually manages the museums, operas, theaters, and publishing companies that the highbrow man relies upon to feel perched up in his enlightened state of being. But when it comes down to the bottom line, the upper-middlebrow is continuously caught between the demands of the masses and the demands of the highbrows. There is no easy solution, and not everyone can be pleased at once.
The lower-middlebrow, by contrast, is aware of cultural distinction and how one asserts his status in society via taste, but he also wants art and culture to do something for him. The lower-middlebrow is often the guiltiest of appropriating art to utilitarian ends. He wants a specific effect from what he spends his time with. Think of the housewife who participates in book clubs that partake equally in respected literature as well as racier pablum, or the single man who reads self-help books about how to pick up girls, or the woman who perhaps watches a film specifically because it might unlock a certain emotion that she’s after, not because she’s interested in the purity of individual self-expression or anything like that. Today’s lower-middlebrow listens to “lo-fi beats to study/relax to.” The lower-middlebrow is often exploited by the upper-middlebrow to various ends, whether economic or political (curiously, Lynes only mentions politics once in the essay) but she doesn’t particularly mind. The middlebrows essentially dominate American society and keep it rolling along, and though it isn’t explicitly stated, it seems that the key to their supremacy is the comfort with which they accept their own desire for status and economic security.
II – Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow in 1976
What I find so compelling in the analysis is that Lynes mostly ignores economic class and education level and focuses instead on the attitude of each “brow” as its primary criterion. Lynes’s purpose is to demonstrate how one’s taste is increasingly a marker of one’s status within society (this kind of thing really bugs the money-reductionist Marxist types). Whichever brow you occupy comes firstly from your attitude. And if we accept this principle as a given, it renders a lot of later sociological work on the subject irrelevant. For instance, the sociologist Richard A. Peterson argued in 1996 that the highbrow has gone from being a snob to being an omnivore. In his thinking, highbrow is no longer about saying that you hate all rap or country music; rather, it’s saying that you only like the authentic rap or country. This is an interesting observation, to be sure, but he defines highbrow entirely by education level and social class. The implication being, there is always going to be a “highbrow” no matter what, and it’s always whoever is at the top.
I wouldn’t be so sure, and neither was Lynes when he wrote a follow-up to his own essay almost thirty years later in 1976. As he argued, the highbrows started having a hard go of things in the 1950s and the upper-middlebrows flourished in their stead. Though he doesn’t bring this up, the subject of jazz music makes the point well. Lynes, back in ’47, argued that jazz was originally lowbrow (true), and then it caught the attention of the highbrows (also true). This was around the time when bebop was invented, highbrow aesthetes started to look at Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie, and they recognized that jazz musicians could be pretty impressive. What Lynes didn’t quite realize was that “cool jazz” was about to blow the hell up, and this new style invited just about every middle-class mediocrity in the world to start not only listening to jazz but writing about it as well. You can get a sense of this middlebrow migration from its more outraged, racially chauvinist critics. For instance, Edward Bland, in his 1959 documentary/polemic film The Cry of Jazz, argues that a) jazz is by and for black people, b) white people are subhumans who lack souls because they haven’t suffered as much as blacks, and c) jazz is utterly dead, cool jazz is fake nonsense for happy white people, and any innovation within jazz after bebop is simply not real jazz. He was a little upset about too many middlebrows listening to his lowbrow music. A year later, the critic Leroi Jones, also a black racial chauvinist, had this to say:
because the majority of jazz critics are white middlebrows, most jazz criticism tends to enforce white middlebrow standards of excellence as criteria for performance of a music that in its most profound manifestations is completely antithetical to such standards.
Not a bad point. And many white highbrows agreed, despite Jones’s all-encompassing, well-documented contempt for them as well.
Highbrows, for their part, were confused and disoriented by the middlebrow embrace of art forms they previously had considered just for them (and maybe some lowbrow noble savages). For the most part, non-highbrows were supposed to admire highbrow art from afar; not actually engage with it. But when community theaters and public art museums, for instance, started to get much more traffic in the 1950s, and the US State Department even started promoting and funding the arts, this did not help the highbrow one bit. Government funding, in fact, did a whole lot to mess things up for the highbrow, not only because of public museums but also because of the immense Cold War-era funding for the university system. Lynes, in ’76, argues that the line between upper-middlebrows and highbrows was becoming increasingly blurred, while the difference between upper and lower-middlebrows was becoming increasingly sharp and distinct.
III – Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow in 2023
Though he doesn’t couch his analysis in clear, precise bullet points, a basic sense emerges of how the middlebrows might be boiled down: they’re worldlier, and they’re fine with it. The lower-middlebrows are utilitarian by nature, while the upper-middlebrows are thoroughly enmeshed within the marketplace. They’re concerned with culture as a building block to earn money or advance themselves socially. Highbrows, by contrast, want to be like aristocrats. Aristocrats don’t strive; they’re already there. One of the truest highbrow connoisseurs of the arts was Ludwig II, King of Bavaria (1845-1886), a mentally ill closeted homosexual who drained the state coffers on extravagant palaces and whose lavish funding was indispensable for Richard Wagner’s opera career. That’s a guy who let the Muses take him wherever they pleased. Aristocrats of course had to engage with the affairs of the world, but they also felt they could spare the expense of being wholly enthralled by beauty and in doing so leaving the world behind. That’s the difference between them and today’s middlebrows, upper and lower. In the past, elites approached leisure as a state of mind, whereas for middlebrows, leisure is the mere absence of work, and thus the preparation for more work — an activity that potentiates better quality work.
In the past, the American highbrows were old money WASPs. Think Boston Brahmins — American liberals whose liberalism would be jarring and unrecognizable to the average person today, since they knew they were better than everyone and had earned the right to be the tastemakers by dint of their fine breeding. They weren’t aristocrats, though some of them came from aristocratic stock; they worked in government, the university, finance, and business. They were merely the American version of the European aristocrats, but all things considered, they did alright. Without their descendants, modernists like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound would not have the legacy that they do today. These old money WASPs began their great decline in the 1950s, right about the time when the highbrows started to have a hard go of things and other ethnic groups, like Catholics and especially Jews, began their ascent.
But reducing the fall of the highbrow to ethnicity wouldn’t give us the whole picture. The shifts in media tell the other half of the story. The 1950s was also the time of television and the LP record, which reduced the need to go to the theater or the concert hall. The age of the couch potato had begun, and information was becoming cheaper (Lynes, in an interview from ‘83, talks about the importance of the paperback book). Decades later, the tape cassette came out for both audio and video, then the CD and DVD, and then finally the internet. Digital information technology finally brought the abundance of information to an all-time high and its cost to an all-time low. The consumption of art has since become a largely private affair, with the internet and digital streaming serving as the means through which people can curate and fine-tune their own idiosyncratic yearnings and desires.
This cheapening of the arts has happened concomitantly with their increasing politicization. The university system has been largely responsible for this, since they produce the politicized men and women who are brought into the writers’ rooms for various forms of entertainment. But politics has also proven to be a powerful form of symbolic currency at a time in which people struggle to find a justification for why they’re enjoying whatever they’re enjoying. The middlebrow man wants to feel engaged; it’s a bonus if he feels that in some sense he’s being civically responsible by watching, say, a televised drama or a stand-up comedian. When people are losing their national and ethnic myths, they’ll place in high esteem what feels common, and the national news remains a common discourse.
With politicization, much of lowbrow entertainment is no longer truly lowbrow at all. Instead, it is filled with social and political ideas, some of them relatively complex, about how the world ought to work or what its problems are. Some of the most popular “lowbrow” entertainment is made specifically as a reaction to the lowbrow work of yesteryear. Tropes and conventions are constantly upended, to the point that the ways in which they’re upended themselves become new tropes to upend. “Escapism” used to be a frequent insult for lowbrow entertainment, but today, true escapism through the arts is quite rare. Video games are a good example. Gamergate, far from being a mere misogynistic harassment campaign, was a rebellion of the lowbrows against their beloved games being contaminated by social messages. Rather than a political movement, it was a fight to escape from politics.
As more upper-middlebrows started to usurp the position of the highbrows, and art started to be cheap and publicly available to everyone, one response to the confusion was to reflexively hate everything that’s popular. Another was to enjoy everything that might ward away the masses. The popularity of unpleasant serialist music and abstract expressionist paintings among educated elites was an expression of this sensibility. If the common boob says it’s bad, then it must be too advanced for that fool! He should stick to his Reader’s Digest recommendations! Ha, ha! But as the universities continued to distend outward and the upper-middlebrows accordingly gained more power, this attitude became increasingly deprivileged. Classical music, particularly from the twentieth century, continues to remain highbrow fare, but it’s almost entirely propped up by the state. So when some public intellectual says, “I don’t like classical music!” you can expect to hear a chorus of cheers and applause from other upper-middlebrows ensconced within the same state-funded university system, even though they themselves might passively enjoy some SirisXM classical radio from time to time. Now, if a thousand highbrows scream out in protest and no one hears them, do they even exist?
No, really. Do they? This is a real question I’m asking. When you have an unprecedented amount of cultural information circulating around, heaps and heaps of it, the most interesting stuff is going to be increasingly disparate and far-flung, and what a highbrow considers interesting will be often cater to his individual tastes. So if a highbrow wants to write about the most important scenes or trends in the arts, he can present all of them on their own terms, but this would prove fruitless, since he no longer has control over the universities or mass publications. When you aren’t holding the megaphone, or your megaphone is just sort of crappy, the message “this is excellent purely for its own sake!” won’t take you very far. So, failing that, he can find some justification for what he likes that will signal its importance to a wider audience. And by doing so, he meets the audience half-way, taking into consideration their own deep-seated concerns and desires, extrinsic and worldly as they are. In his success, whatever highbrow inclinations he once possessed have been decanted from him.
So having said that, it’s worth asking if the highbrow attitude can even be said to exist. Most would-be internet tastemakers who present themselves as highbrow are faking it. They’re middlebrow to the core, and you can tell it in how they promote what they promote. They largely couch their criticism in utilitarian terms, or self-help terms, or they argue that art ought to make you feel a certain way, or they couch the work’s importance in political terms or affix political allegorical meanings to it, since they know that politics is the only surviving remnant of mass culture and thus the most efficient way of driving engagement numbers. If a guy says, “Reading Wyndham Lewis on the tram is a form of rebellion,” he might be a great commentator, but he’s not really highbrow. The pretense has all gone away. And that’s how it is online with pretty much all of the major tastemakers. Above all, they’re in the business of selling their audience a lifestyle. The most popular self-styled internet aesthetes are political pundits first, self-help gurus second, aesthetes third.
IV. Are the Middlebrows The Enemy?
I’d like to suggest something. Technology doesn’t necessarily destroy the cultural highbrow, but in order to survive, it has to remain relatively exclusive. Highbrows have to be able to cordon themselves off from the rest of society, and even produce content in a language that the common man wouldn’t even be able to read. Highbrows must rely on their own economy and circulation to remain unmolested by the middlebrow guys, who will cheapen the product with their politics, their attempts to be philosophical, or their schmaltzy sentimentalism. They have to keep their brahmin status secured via exclusivity. What Turchin has called “the overproduction of elites” has been bad for anything highbrow. And the same principles actually apply to the lowbrow arts, as well. The openness of all information naturally favors the men who want their kulchur to serve as a means of social or economic advancement.
But it also appears that if middlebrows, upper and lower, start to become interested in something, then that thing can potentially flourish in ways it previously couldn’t. For instance, let’s go back to the example of jazz. In the 1950s, the middlebrows started to appreciate cool jazz. It became a tool wherein you could feel classy while throwing a dinner party. It was background music for witty banter. But in its popularity, the musicians had creative leeway, allowing them to experiment with sounds and ideas that the market wouldn’t have supported before. Guys like Lennie Tristano and Cecil Taylor took jazz in increasingly dissonant directions; Dave Brubeck and Don Ellis started to experiment with unconventional time signatures; Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter helped remove jazz from conventional tonality and made it modal; Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry dispensed with piano chords and turned the improvised harmonies of the wind instruments into the center of a piece’s development; Ed Blackwell and Elvin Jones experimented with polyrhythms, making the drumming more multi-directional than it had been before; “third stream” jazz was invented by Gunther Schuller, fusing jazz with classical music. On and on.
My point is that when the middlebrows have decided that something is good, even for whatever impure, alloyed reasons they might have, that thing now has the financial means and social support to creatively achieve more than it previously could. When it has those means, then the potential for innovation can come about. And while true that the average fan will be annoying and often clueless, it’s upon his back that the artists can stand as they reach to the sun and insolently strive to achieve their singular vision.
Politicization, however, is where it has all gone wrong over the past few decades. While cultural highbrows have been deprivileged enough to be considered altogether irrelevant, man’s natural desire to demonstrate his superiority to his peers remains intact, and absurd political opinions have replaced confusing or difficult artwork as the means through which this goal is achieved. Luxury beliefs have become the upper-middlebrow’s answer to Joyce and Proust. They combine conspicuous moralism and sentimentalism together, producing counterintuitive analysis or incoherent policy proposals, and thus they’re far inferior to the markers of superiority that our WASP elites of the past preferred. In a word, they’re not simply political but hyperpolitical. And if there’s any great reason to see the upper-middlebrow as the enemy, hyperpoliticization is pretty much it.