Word: lowbrowed
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...strip and its larger-than-life iconography without conventional middlebrow contempt. The movement's manifesto is Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi's examination of crowd-pleasing architectural symbolism and buildings designed primarily for drivers. The irony is so American, so pop: cultural highbrows celebrating unself-conscious lowbrow vulgarity...
...found one, his choice seemed to much of the staff, and to many of the Times's top-drawer readers, a fate worse than death: Australian Press Lord Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of the tabloid daily Sun, which features screaming headlines and photographs of naked women, and the equally lowbrow Sunday News of the World. As proof of his good intentions, Murdoch recruited Harold Evans, for 14 years the esteemed editor of the separate Sunday Times, to run the daily edition; within 13 months, Murdoch sacked him. Like his predecessor, Murdoch confronted unions and threatened to shut down forever...
Neither he nor any of his contemporaries cared much about the social background or specific religious meanings of the work - and probably the more lowbrow avantgardists, like Maurice de Vlaminck, mentally reduced it all to mission ary-stew, bone-in-the-nose cliche. Not even Brancusi, whose borrowings of African motifs were of the most exalted refinement (as in Madame L.R., 1914-18, whose domed "head" comes from a Hongwe reliquary figure), had an "anthropological" interest in his sources. To him they were pure form...
Television is lowbrow--our electronic lowest common denominator--and it has none of the charm (like, say, detective novels) to propel it into the realm of any sort of artistic appreciation. It's not just the game shows, and it's not just those godawful pre fabricated housewives choosing between potatoes or stuffing or sinus drainer. It goes beyond that, somehow. There's always been a certain embarrassment about television, as if at its center were some yawning pit, some frivolous darkness upon which we can project the worst of our adolescent self-images...
Disgusting, repulsive, lowbrow, nauseating. I'm no Victorian, but those individuals should crawl into a hole and pull it in after them-and take TIME with them...