![]() Surely these are only highbrow to the relentlessly middlebrow. Then there's the sub-category of once-middlebrow-but-now-highbrow, in which Friend includes Matthew Brady's Civil War photos, the "Godfather" movies and Frank Sinatra (after he dies). The longer Friend goes on, the more he loses his grip on his definitions, especially when he gets into sub-categories, like "highlowbrows." These are highbrow types who appropriate lowbrow icons ("Gilligan's Island," the New York Post) for campy effect Friend puts Martin Amis, David Lynch, Laurie Anderson and Jonathan Demme in this group. It's not that Friend always chooses right his ability to provoke specific disagreement suggests that there's a potential parlor game in this - popular, needless to say, among middlebrows. It imputes and then fetishizes difficulty for its own sake, as a way of asserting cultural superiority over the less-learned." To aspire to highbrow, he says, "leads us to waste time listening to Anton Webern, reading John Ashbery, and watching plays directed by Peter Sellars."įriend is willing to name names, and his lists of middlebrow figures are sure to puncture secret conceits: Andrew Lloyd Webber. How do you recognize middlebrow? "Where highbrow is angst, ennui, schadenfreude, middlebrow is anxiety, boredom, envy." Highbrow, Friend says, "is merely a stance of complexity. reconnects the intellectual with the emotional." He's making the case for a common language: "To neglect middlebrow is to deal yet another blow to the civilized and informed discourse, one in which we can all participate and have some clue about what everybody else is talking about." "In a culture riven by a choice between 'Koyaanisqatsi' and 'Porky's,' between works contrived to tickle the rarefied palates of the few and those constructed to microwave the permafrozen brains of the many, middlebrow. "It's time to bring middlebrow out of its cultural closet," Friend writes. "The Case for Middlebrow" is one of those contrary delights, a serious (well, nearly) argument for a humiliating but liberating admission. Whatever your affectations, do yourself the possibly unsettling favor of reading Tad Friend's cover essay in this week's New Republic (March 2). Face facts: Given the choice between seeing "Black Orpheus" or "The Graduate," you'd choose the latter.
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