Long Live Middlebrow!

If this were 1962 and not 2012, Kurt Elling would be on the cover of Time magazine.

I had that thought last week, when, within the space of 24 hours, two things happened. Time, which was once a serious weekly magazine, came out with a sensationalistic cover photo of a woman breast-feeding her 3 year-old son.

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Hours later I went to go see Kurt Elling sing. Elling is the finest and most innovative jazz singer working today. As I said, 50 years ago it may well have been Elling and not the bored and breastfeeding mom on the cover of Time.

Middlebrow is dead, long live middlebrow. Middlebrow is, or was, art that is promoted to and enjoyed by the masses. In the 20th century that meant the Book-of-the-Month Club, jazz, certain architecture and plays (Our Town), all of which allowed the consumer to feel educated without taking on the challenges of highbrow (opera or classical music) or avant garde art. In its best years in the early to mid 20th century, Time covered both middlebrow and highbrow culture. It had both Reinhold Niebuhr and Duke Ellington on the cover.

Those days are over. The breast-feeding cover was the final death rattle. Time, and the rest of the media, is officially lowbrow.

But people would be foolish to lament the end of Time. We live in a golden age where the middlebrow, highbrow, and lowbrow are accessible with the click of a mouse or as an instant book download. It's possible to go online and take courses from the best universities in America, or hear the best symphonies. Last I checked, Orthodoxy, the classic by G.K. Chesterton, was available on Amazon for free. Imagine what Abraham Lincoln would make of that. Our engagement with art is entirely up to us. We are the teachers we have been waiting for.

Author and historian Fred Siegel has a lengthy and interesting essay in the May issue of Commentary magazine. He explores the rise and fall of middlebrow, which died, according to Siegel, because of irony, camp, and the rise of post-1960s popular culture.

Siegel explores the hostility that liberal elites have had for the "Americanism" of the masses dating back to the 1920s, when writers like H.L. Mencken and Aldous Huxley condemned a country of "the booboisie" and "babbitts." To the avant garde of the day, Americans were ignorant rubes who couldn't tell a symphony from Shakespeare.

After World War II -- when the elites went silent because those same American idiots took down Germany and Japan -- the same theme emerged again. In the 1950s popular social critic Dwight MacDonald wrote that "the masses are not people, they are not The Man in the Street or The Average Man, they are not even that figment of liberal condescension, The Common Man. The masses are, rather, man as non-man." He quoted the author Roger Fry as saying Americans "have lost the power to be individuals. They have become social insects like bees and ants."

Yet as Siegel notes, the liberal criticism was at odds with the facts. After World War II, notes Siegel, "the public's expanding taste and increased income produced a 250 percent growth in the number of local symphony orchestras between 1940 and 1955. In that same year, 1955, 15 million people paid to attend major league baseball games, while 35 million paid to attend classical music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera's Saturday afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million out of an overall population of 165 million."

Siegel posits that the real problem with Americans and culture happened in the 1960s. In 1964 the critic Susan Sontag published her hugely influential essay, "Notes on Camp." Sontag argued for a new attitude towards both high art and popular culture. As Siegel explains, "camp is playful, a rebuke of sorts to the cultural mandarins. More precisely, camp involves a new, more complex relation to what she called 'the serious.' It allowed people to 'be serious about the frivolous, [and] frivolous about the serious.' Sontag was saying it was all right for serious people to enjoy the kitsch of popular culture as long as they did it with the correct -- superior and ironic -- attitude."

Siegel argues that by the 1970s camp had almost completely dethroned the serious in art. By then "the cultural striving of middlebrow culture came to a quiet end. Why should the well-meaning middle American labor to read a complex novel by an intellectual or try to work his way through a Great Book if the cultural poohbahs first mocked his efforts and then said they were pointless anyway because what mattered was living ‘life as theater'?"

Siegel ends his piece there, and that's where I think a problem lies. Siegel makes it seem as if America was like 5th century Athens until Susan Sontag showed up, and then the mockery of the New York elites made people in Ohio put down their copies of Dickens and stop watching Masterpiece Theater. But something funny has happened in the last 50 years: there was a technological revolution that now brings the art of the world to our fingers; and much of what was considered ephemeral popular art is now considered art without qualification.

Sontag's camp had its day, and is still alive in places like Manhattan, but the world has moved on from it. And a large reason is that a lot of the popular culture that Sontag thought of as stuff to have playful, ironic fun with is now considered art. Real art.

No one these days is waiting for the Beatles fad to end; instead, we are debating where the group will take its place in the history of masterpieces of Western music. Science fiction was once considered a low art form -- campy fun, as Sontag and her fans might say. Now much of it is considered real literature, and not for reasons that have anything to do with dumbing down. I don't think that John C. Wright or William Gibson are worse writers than Aldous Huxley or George Orwell. Television is completely different in quality than it was 40 years ago; Mad Men is not Charlie's Angels.

And the truly wonderful thing is that in our age of intel wonders, the art and culture of the world, both high and low, is at our fingertips. I have been acquiring an interest in Beethoven and have heard a lot about the young conductor Gustavo Dudamel. With a couple taps on the computer I can be listening to -- or watching -- Beethoven's 5th.

My Kindle can have me reading virtually any book in seconds, many of them classic available for pennies or even free. There no longer exists the middlebrow book clubs that Siegel celebrates, but that is only because technology has made the entire world a book club. No amount of mockery form any elite can prevent any person, even the most average Joe sitting in his TV room in Ohio, from having instant access to Dostoevsky and Shakespeare. His desire to self-improve and immerse himself in culture is entirely on him.

It is all entirely on us. And if I'm reading William Gibson's Neuromancer instead of Tolstoy, that's not necessarily a loss.

Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearReligion and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.