>Modern art is a mixed bag. The cultural elite who ran the Congress
>for Cultural Freedom liked it because it was elitist (but yahoos in
>the U.S. Congress thought they were supporting Commie art by funding
>the likes of Jackson Pollock). There's some resemblance between
>Jesse Helms and Joe Stalin's artistic taste, no?
A sign of middlebrow used to consist of its incomprehension of high art and horror of lower-class entertainment (or so says our common sense). Today most of us in rich nations are all trained to enjoy high & low, but never middle (though one can say there is nothing more middlebrow than a studied contempt for middlebrow). A cultural avoidance of the middle serves as a dialectical opposite of the embrace of the middle in political rhetoric (a deconstructive neither-nor, a pox on both houses, the Third Way, etc.). Must be an indirect effect of post-WW2 expansion of higher education.
The Popular Front culture, in contrast, was often decidedly middlebrow (Orson Welles and his love of popularizing Shakespeare, for instance) in taste but politically partisan (which side are you on?).
Yoshie ----------------
If you look for a sequel to some mass cultural expression of middlebrow work, like say the popularizations or stylizations of Shakespeare or Beethoven in the forties and fifties, where I think you arrive is in the advertising and graphic arts industry and of course some movies, like The Titanic or unfortunately, Matrix. These movies reach just enough out of a bland and forgettable realm of expression and technique to almost gain a hold of their histo-cultural moments, and then evaporate or melt back down into the nameless mire.
The ad industry (much of it) makes a fetish of middlebrow as the gimmick or hook to reach and then push the immanence of the bourgeoisie. There is just enough of high or low or whatever, to move the sensibility to a boundary, where the economic reality is challenged to extend itself and make the big leap to buy--including of course in the case of cars what can not actually be afforded, except through credit. Most of this effect is achieved through an exquisite technical mastery of media imagery and narrative. If you doubt the mastery, just try to tell a story in less than thirty seconds with a flickering montage of images, and a chaotic, chopped sound track and discover what's going on. These all depend on your knowledge and precise reading of the stream of mass media and the endless nuances of its own historical moments. These moments act as age graded reference points that match the statistical profile of the target audience.
But what's more interesting is that this temporal stream of imagery and memory, locked together in mass media, now takes the place of concrete history. In short, it is history, as in the grand narrative. Vietnam is reduced to the naked girl whose cloths were burned off, running down a dirt road, civil rights is MLK at the Lincoln Memorial, the Seventies are the mod-squad and Mullulas of Tehran, the Eighties are Reagan and the Iron Maiden, just as the Nineties will be the Berlin Wall (even though it was November '89) and the phrase, `I did not have sex with that woman...' (that fine, peachy, thang...). But these are the middlebrow, politically tinted themes of the quasi-documentry. There are others, streams that follow pure or politically sanitized themes in pop culture that the ad world is more likely to prefer: glass beads and Ravi Shankar(?), Afros and bell-bottoms, the young computer geek faces of evil Bill, and jean clad Steve (momentoes of authenticity), all bright and hopeful, futuristic shit to fit the big wonderful world of, suitability reconstructed, and forever new, moments reaching now.
But curiously it doesn't work as history and as narrative should, because narrative is experiential time, but the montage and chopped sound bite destroy experiential time. So there is an infinitude of dis-satisfaction, a recurrance of or resurgence of memory lost and alienated from its own temporal streams and associations. In short, we are not that, whatever it is, that is endlessly portrayed as us. Perhaps it is this experience that forms the ground against which the endless streams of post-modern theory depend.
In any event, I think Jackson Pollock was a commie of sorts, as was his wife Lee Krasner and quite a few other artists in AE--David Smith for example. Remember a lot of these people worked on WPA projects in the Thirties and were around the unions and street level political groups of the era.
There was a pretty good, as in middle brow and sanitized, PBS documentary the other night on the Beats with some very chopped footage of Burroughs skin popping and smoking hash with some Peruvian or Algerian street kids. But of course we certainly don't want to linger on those images too long do we--lest the nasty repugnants of our grand republic take offense.
Chuck Grimes