Word: masscult
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...