Word: midcult
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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...
...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...
...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...