Word: masscult
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That great leveling effect, however, has not made pop any more palatable to old-line intellectuals. The contempt was, until rather recently, obligatory and absolute. Mandarin ill will reached a peak in "Masscult & Midcult," Dwight Macdonald's acutely cranky 1960 essay. "Masscult is bad in a new way," he wrote, because "it doesn't even have the theoretical possibility of being good." A pernicious "Gresham's law" was inevitable: good art would be driven out by the bad -- by pop. Another ferocious holdout is William Gass, a very intelligent critic whose opaque, self-conscious novels are the sort of fiction...
...antiwar movement of the '60s. A fastidious critic, he graced Esquire and The New Yorker with sometimes highhanded pronouncements about movies, books and overblown fads. Observing in a 1960 essay that "the Lords of Kitsch sell culture to the masses," Macdonald famously defined and deflated the tastes of Masscult and Midcult...
After the boom, slump. Millet had died in 1875, having greatly influenced Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat, blue-period Picasso and especially Vincent Van Gogh. Later, modernism lost interest in images of rural labor; they were derided as sentimental masscult. Millet sank from view, leaving behind one obdurate cliché: The Angelus, in its tacky frame, on every parlor wall...
Banality and Bliss. The truth of certain maxims once thought demode and elitist now reasserts itself: for instance, that a posture of cool boredom can in itself become boring; that a perfunctory infatuation with the signs and portents of "masscult" means nothing unless it is subjected-as by Oldenburg-to a profound change and rethinking; that banality is not always imaginative bliss. And if one happens to find sense in these propositions, it is hard to take all that seriously the marginal artists whose work Alloway has selected. Their work may have this or that to do with signs...
...camp boutiques to Parke-Bernet, and a New York art dealer named Bernard Danenberg has contracted with Walt Disney Productions to exhibit "eels" (the clear plastic sheets on which final animation drawings are made) from a new Disney cartoon, Robin Hood. This migration of Disney's iconography from masscult to the commercial fringes of "high" art (it happened to Norman Rockwell last year) will be prodded along by a 7½-lb. tome entitled The Art of Walt Disney, written by English Art Critic Christopher Finch with the full cooperation of the Disney Archives and published...