In the culture supplement of last Saturday’s La Repubblica, Angelo Aquaro and Marc Augé wrote about the Italian publication of Mainstream by Frédéric Martel. They went on to look at new forms of cultural globalization and returned to a question that reemerges every so often, though always from a different perspective, namely, the dividing line between high culture and low culture.
Though the distinction may seem strange to young people who listen just as much to Mozart as to world music, I should point out that this was a live issue in the mid-twentieth century, and that in the 1960s Dwight Macdonald, in “Masscult and Midcult,” a magnificent and stylish essay, identified not two but three levels. High culture, just to be clear, was represented by Joyce, Proust, and Picasso, while what he called Masscult included the whole of popular trash, including the covers of the Saturday Evening Post and rock music. Macdonald was one of those intellectuals who never had a television in the house, while those more open to modernity had one in the kitchen.
But Macdonald identified a third level, the Midcult, a middle culture represented by entertainment products that borrowed stylistic elements from the avant-garde but were fundamentally kitsch. Among Midcult products, Macdonald named, from the past, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edmond Rostand, and from his own time, Somerset Maugham, late Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder, and he would probably have added many books published successfully in Italian by Adelphi, which alongside examples of highbrow culture has brought together such names as Somerset Maugham, Sándor Márai, and the sublime Simenon—Macdonald would have classified Simenon’s non-Maigrets as Midcult and his Maigret stories as Masscult.
Yet the division between popular culture and aristocratic culture is not as old as we might imagine. Marc Augé quotes the case of Victor Hugo’s funeral, attended by hundreds of thousands of people. Was Hugo Midcult or high culture? Even the fishmongers of Piraeus went to Sophocles’s tragedies. Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, when first published in the 1840s, had an impressive number of pirated editions, an indication of its popularity. And let’s not forget the story of the blacksmith who mangled the words of Dante’s verse, angering the poet but demonstrating at the same time that his poetry was known to illiterates.
It’s true that Romans abandoned the performance of a comedy by Terence to go and watch bearbaiting, but today too many highly cultured intellectuals are prepared to forgo a concert so they can watch a soccer match. The distinction between two or three cultures becomes clearly defined only when historical avant-garde movements set about provoking the bourgeoisie; then they choose illegibility, or the rejection of representational forms, as their value.
Has this rift survived up to our own time? No, because musicians like Luciano Berio and Henri Pousseur took rock music seriously, and many rock singers are more familiar with classical music than we might imagine. Pop art has broken cultural boundaries; the prize for illegibility today goes to many sophisticated comics; much music from spaghetti westerns is remade into concert music. One look at a late-night television auction will reveal how clearly unsophisticated viewers—anyone buying a picture via television auction is not a member of the cultural elite—are buying abstract canvases their parents would have attributed to the tail of a donkey, and, Augé says, “between high culture and mass culture there is a covert interaction, and often the second feeds on the richness of the first.” I would add to that: “And vice versa.”
Cultural levels today are perhaps distinguished not so much by their content or their artistic form as by the way in which they are enjoyed. In other words, the difference no longer depends on whether it’s Beethoven or “Jingle Bells.” A piece of Beethoven that becomes a cell phone ringtone, or airport or elevator music, is enjoyed absent-mindedly, as Walter Benjamin would have said, and therefore, for anyone using it in such a way, comes to resemble an advertising jingle. On the other hand, a tune created for a detergent commercial can become the subject of critical attention, appreciated for its rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic inspiration. It is not so much the object that changes but the way it is perceived. There’s attentive perception and inattentive perception, and an example of inattentive perception is the use of Wagner as the theme tune for the Italian television version of Survivor. In the meantime, the more cultured listener will go off and appreciate an old vinyl recording of “Tea for Two.”
2010