Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Weinberg at Psyche:
‘If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm,’ Virginia Woolf once wrote, ‘dares call me “middlebrow” I will take my pen and stab him, dead.’ With this, in an unsent letter to the New Statesman in 1932, she set the high (and highbrow) standard of contempt for the category. While the decades since have seen titanic growth in middlebrow art across all media, there has been little change in this default impression of ‘middlebrow’ as a term somewhere between a literary expression of dismissal, and an outright slur. Although the ‘lowbrow’ has, in recent years, been reclaimed as a legitimate aesthetic domain, the middlebrow continues to be a denigrated and troublesome category. The highbrow has its defenders (snobs) and the lowbrow its defenders (hipsters), but it is not easy to find defenders of the middlebrow. We thus come not to bury the middlebrow, but to praise it. Middlebrow is a term of appraisal that admits not just of bad, but good, even brilliant, instances.
To do so, however, we must first take up the question of what the middlebrow is.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.