Russell Lynes popularized the terms in his 1949 essay “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” and his history of American popular taste, The Tastemakers: “You cannot tell a man he is a lowbrow any more than you can tell a woman that her clothes are in bad taste, but a highbrow does not mind being called a highbrow.” Posted in DASR 2016 Post navigation I caught up with one interviewee at Fox Studios, where films and shows as varied as The Sound of Music, M*A*S*H, Die Hard, and Bones have been filmed. Does the persistent hierarchical valuation of culture-entrenched even today in class, race, gender, and general condescension-look any better when we label the ranks differently? If we divorce hierarchy from the brows, are we denouncing an antiquated and disturbing means of understanding the mind, or are we comforting ourselves in avoiding a hard look at the way we actually process culture? Perhaps our discomfort with (and at times, as with Mallon, our begrudging acceptance of) these terms betrays a deeper insecurity about how we assign worth. Whether we identify those rankings as highbrow, lowbrow, pop, mass, or prestige, however, doesn’t seem to me to be the greater issue. This is the culture that I have been examining as I interview LA-based culture-makers and -partakers, and that I will try to articulate as the summer goes on. Crafty Dogma | Flickr We certainly do live in a culture that still enjoys its rankings. Erika Janik over at the Atlantic tells us that when you’re striving to be “well rounded” or looking to see a “shrink,” or if you need to “get your head examined,” you’re harkening back to the same thing. “A certain whiff of racialism and eugenics should have been enough to do in this word by now,” muses Thomas Mallon in the New York Times, “but it has retained a smidgen of utility in a culture that still likes to rank the prestige of artistic endeavors.” The brows aren’t the only linguistic legacy of this defunct practice. People believed that a high brow literally signified intelligence, and it was ideas such as this one that led some to use phrenology to validate the racism and classism of the period. According to phrenology, the study of a person’s skull could reveal the character of their mind. Highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow as categories for arts, tastes, and culture in general originated in the early 20th century, with roots in the previous century’s popular practice of phrenology. I am in Los Angeles investigating cultural hierarchy in art and entertainment, and, in homage to one of my favorite movies in my favorite poppy genre, the project is called “When Lowbrow Met Highbrow.” The question weighing on my mind in these first few weeks of research has been one of terminology.
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