Word: midcult
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...Crime writer Lawrence Block believes Spillane did more than spice up a genre; he created a format that bridged midcult and low art, print and picture. Block notes that Hammer "was originally intended as a comic-strip hero. The fast cuts, the in-your-face immediacy, and the clear-cut, no-shades-of-gray, good-versus-evil story lines of the Mike Hammer novels come straight out of the comic-book world. Mickey Spillane was writing something else - comic books for grown-ups." I, the Jury, then, can lay claim to being the first graphic novel, just without illustrations...
...Novels, foreign films, stage plays - isn't all this caviar culture, or at least quiche? Well, it's true that midcult media didn't necessarily penetrate the mass skull. But for the first time, many Americans were sophisticated enough to have developed a cultural inferiority complex. So they went looking elsewhere, and their restlessness encouraged the rise of small industries (back when industries could be small) in publishing, foreign-film distribution and off-Broadway production. Grove Press, Janus Films, Circle in the Square: even today these names have the aura of heroism about them. They located the nexus...
...there are also some bad fairies at the party, a small band for whom two minutes' exposure to Frasier, with its forced repartee about boutonnieres, is an excruciating experience in midcult hell. For us, the apotheosis of Frasier is not a great cause for celebration. What are we going to do on Thursdays at 9? The alternatives aren't terrible: we could watch Diagnosis Murder, the sublimely hokey CBS drama. We could read Wallace Stevens. But is it possible that there is another option? Could it be that even someone most resistant to Frasier's charms could learn to love...
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...
...although the adjective papal casts an aura over any noun it touches, and is one of the favorite words of cultural coercion in the Midcult lexicon (like masterpiece and treasure), one should use it with reserve. The papacy may be infallible in dogma, but not in taste. And although the exhibition claims to show us in detail just what the changing relations of the Popes to art were, it does not deliver the goods. It contains only routine information and no fresh ideas about the liturgical, propagandist, doctrinal and decorative purposes of Vatican collecting, or the effect of that collecting...