It was only 50 or so years agone that critics and intellectuals were interfering constructing -- and redrawing, and shoring up -- hierarchies just about what kinds of civilization were good for us and which ones were bad. ¶ Literary man Dwight Macdonald wrote a famous essay about "Masscult and Midcult" -- both, he aforementioned, were degrading real, traditional High Culture. Art critic Clement Greenberg, in an influential essay about modern painting, looked at "Avant-garde and Kitsch," championing the former as essential to the human spirit and denouncing the latter as tinder for a fascist revolution. ¶ But judgment from my recent conversations with a handful of literary and intellectual types -- the heirs, you could say, to the Macdonald/Greenberg tradition -- we live, today, in a pleasingly hierarchy-free, almost utopian cultural world. Most hoi polloi I know share my disparate penchant, enjoying " South Park" alongside Franz Schubert, the crisply plotted novels of James M. Cain as well as the philosophically searching films of Antonioni.
Do guilty conscience or shame still play a role in formation people's taste? The answer was a unanimous "no." What I found rather when I asked my posse what culture they were overwhelming this summer was a sense of good impression, an expectation of openness -- a lack of angst all around. (Writer Michael Chabon, whom I interview on Page F9, even aforesaid he hates the very phrase "shamefaced pleasure.")
"My indication in general is kind of heavy and ostentatious," said New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross, who favors modernist literary masterpieces. "But when I go to the movies, I love to see bloated Hollywood blockbusters. I never occupy too very much about the category that those experiences fall into."
"I'll probably go see ' Hellboy II,' " said the unimpeachably smart Salon rule book critic Laura Miller. "I like to see popcorn movies in the theater."
Pico Iyer, the eminent Japan-and- California-based journey writer, told me: "One highlight of recent summers for me was 'Nacho Libre'; I saw it in a packed firm on opening night and subsequently hurried to construe it once again, so carried away was I by Jack Black's impromptu hymn." Like a true 21st century man, Iyer likes to mingle it up: This summer, his darling has been "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," a grim Romanian art-house photographic film (now on DVD) improbable to be remade with Jack Black.
Not that it matters. "To me, high and low, guilt and innocence, masscult and midcult are as out of date at present as East and West and old and new," said Iyer, who thinks globalism and the Internet have shuffled all the decks. "Many of the more interesting artists today, from a Salman Rushdie to a Sigur Ros, blur the distinctions in all kinds of ways 'til we don't know, exhilaratingly, if we're existence elevated or entertained."
Miller was more sober but no less decisive: "There are still some people wHO are snobs about it," she aforesaid. "But they are so few and they don't have much influence on anyone just other snobs."
Fast-tracked freedom
HOW THEN could this melting of the hierarchies have happened so quickly and so completely?
Ross thinks his own listening -- from Messiaen to Missy Elliott to Miles Davis -- is pretty distinctive these years. "The to the highest degree natural province is to have this curiosity and openness," he said, describing "a deep-rooted American nervous impulse. It was only in the 20th century when people really tried to organize and divide different art forms off from each other."
Ross is tender of a scene that begins Lawrence Levine's "Highbrow / Lowbrow," which describes Shakespeare performances on the 19th hundred American frontier. "There were scrambled programs," Ross aforesaid, "with a Rossini aria, then a vaudeville pianist, and and so a movement from a string quartet, and and then dancers, and then something from Shakespeare." That kind of unify, he aforesaid, "is very deeply stock-still culturally," and today's eclecticism is simply a riposte to the way things were earlier culture became sacred.
Novelist and Los Angeles magazine film critic Steve Erickson thinks the frappe broke more recently. "Mass media, as much as anything else, has broken down the distinction betwixt high and low," he said. "One of the reasons the Beatles took over the world was they came along at a certain point on the timeline," when they could appear on "The Ed Sullivan Show," express up in magazines and record songs that would play all over the world with a then-unheard-of speed. Thanks to their interest in classical and experimental music, they made strict highbrow / anti-intellectual divisions look creaky: With 1966's "Revolver" album lonely, said Erickson, "The Beatles obliterated those distinctions."
Other distinctions are thaw away as well. Formerly "uncool" musicians -- psychedelic cowboy Lee Hazlewood, for instance, world Health Organization died last summer -- have become very cool today "because people own gone back to take heed with fresh ears and without those cultural biases," Erickson aforesaid. "Kids today can see something on YouTube and get into it without looking o'er their shoulder."
But it's taken awhile for other perceived bastions of the culture to catch up. "One of the areas that lags behind the catch one's breath of the culture is literature," Erickson said, "with the New York Times perpetuating those high / low distinctions," in the attention it gives to realistic, supposedly "literary" fiction over genre works rooted in fantasy, horror or pulp traditions.
This may be, but Miller, who writes often for that hidebound Times, doesn't think literary types concern all that much around these categories. They don't even turn over pulpy puzzle out a guilty pleasure any longer. "I think most people are so proud of themselves for reading anything," she aforesaid, "that they don't make water a brobdingnagian distinction betwixt high and low."
Instead, they feel guilty about things that seem to them morally condemnable or perfectly mindless.
"What people feel sheeplike about is that they watch '24' and can't stop. . . . It's so politically repellent, only you can't stop observation. As opposed to something that is just fluff. If I read something like a chick-lit book, I don't think I'd feel guilty. Who real feels shamefaced about fluff anymore?"
Americans, she said, began to visualise reading as "morally up" about the time radiocommunication and movies began to dominate leisure time time, and the arrival of telly in the '50s made reading seem more virtuous still. As reading has been affected aside by the Internet and everything else, its connection to virtue has only increased.
Restoring some value
I WONDER sometimes if we may sustain succeeded besides well in getting rid of distinctions, though. It's hard for me to avoid a low-grade occupy that we're losing our ability to recognize quality itself.
"What we seem to have present is more of a hierarchy of media," aforementioned Iyer, "whereby, for exemplar, dance, classical music, opera, and tied theater and books, all of which commanded their own sections in Time magazine only a generation ago, are now regarded as eminent and distant subjects for only a handful of connoisseurs." Those pages, he said, are "given over now to a Britney watch or extended investigations into the new iPhone."
Instead of feeling guilty around reading pulp novels, he said, we worry that we've become "elitist" if we go see chamber music or jazz. "The culture as a whole seems to have decided which arts are elitist and which ones pop, and so made some people feel guilty to be observance European movies [otherwise known as art-house stuff] or to be reading novels not likely to be turned into screenplays."
Having some standards seems more and more than important in a time when the traditional liberal arts have helpless a bit of their prestige, some of their audience, and all of their monopoly on perceived quality. As silly as the chaste, RPLC173% tones of the literary and high acculturation worlds could be in their efflorescence, we need a certain amount of seriousness in our lives. At least I do. If the marketplace is left entirely unfettered, we'll lose a lot of what we consider valuable -- not just J.S. Bach and John Coltrane but shows such as "Deadwood" and nonchain bookstores.
In California, among the least traditional of states, we have an unusual perch. For a long time, it has had a more flexible sense of what was valuable than Eastern elites did. But California became bound up in tyrannical ideas of hipness as well as a Cult of Now. "The West Coast became a conception unto itself," Erickson aforementioned. "And things that didn't conform to that were dismissed as passé."
The large 21st c work seems to me to unify this promiscuous blend of pop styles with a rigor and discipline that comes from the old school approach to serious art. So I don't hardly mean, say, the high-spirited, 1990s-style high / lowisms of Quentin Tarantino and Beck, whose films and music, severally, are marvelous but determined by, let's face it, an juvenile sensibility. (I'm leaving touching, mature knead such as Beck's "Sea Change" and Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" out of this.)
What I'm talk about -- what I hope the demise of rigid hierarchies is leading us to -- is a unfolding of make that draws on the whole range of culture but with a mastermind of structure and sophism as well: novels such as David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," from 2004, which merges a South Seas adventure story with a '70s-style corporate thriller with a science fiction tale into an intricate whole, or Junot Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which rightly north Korean won this year's Pulitzer Prize for its combination of trash-talking, comic book love and identical serious Dominican history lesson.
It's what I expect to find when I ascertain " The Dark Knight," which, let's not forget, was made by Christopher Nolan, an outsider (and lit student) whose first masterpiece, "Memento," was a outre personal vision made with very limited connections to the Hollywood mainstream.
I'd dig those any time, whatsoever season.
walter Scott.timberg@latimes.com
