From: I. Zelnik
Category: Amis
Date: 7/2/99
Time: 7:54:29 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.93
[Poster's note: The following quotes are from *The Case For Middlebrow* by Tad Friend. From *The New Republic* magazine. March 2, 1992. The term *highlowbrow* reminds me of a phrase from Ian Hamilton's review of *Money*: "low slang and high figurative artifice".]
Middlebrow is distinguished by technical competence, singleness of affect, purity of emotion, tidiness of resolution, and modesty of scope. Thus, in 1939 and 1940, Graham Greene wrote *The Confidential Agent* on benzedrine in the mornings and *The Power and the Glory*, more slowly, in the undrugged afternoons. He considered the former one of his "entertainments" (middlebrow); the latter, one of his "serious works" (highbrow). The essential difference between Greene's brows is that his "serious works" are laden with authorial epigrams like "in human love there is never such a thing as victory: only a few minor tactical successes before the final defeat of death or indifference"; or "innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm". *The Confidential Agent* lacks only this wintry philosophy to have a full complement of Greene's characteristic virtues: the overmatched protagonists, the punishing dialogue, the murderous, clockwork plots. Without the philosophy, we have smart fun---middlebrow...
The manifold ways in which middlebrow infuses our culture are either ignored or crudely caricatured by culture guardians addled by dainty loathing. In the culture guardians' claret nightmares, middlebrow is exemplified by a grandmother rocking on a porch somwhere near Decatur, Illinois. She wears a hair net, drinks a glass of Crystal Lite, and furrows her brow over a *Reader's Digest* condensed *Ben-Hur*...
The archetypal contemporary expression of highbrow is best called highlowbrow, in which highbrow condescendingly co-opts low. It's OK to "see" the Steven Seagal movie *Hard to Kill* if you make bets on the body count. In the Sontagian sense, it's a trip to summer camp; the highlow sensibility sees all lowbrow in quotation marks...This trivia-surfing sensibility leads to intellectualized but fundamentally mindless art, to mere quotation and "de-" and "re-contextualizing". Peter Saul takes Donald Duck, paints a jiggly multiple-exposure of him descending a staircase---eh, voilà! a brilliant emblem of our Disneyfication, a cunning restatement of the Duchampian dilemma, etc.
The problem with art that aims at this highlow sensibility is that it often lacks sympathy for---or belief in---our common humanity. So pervasive has highlow cynicism become that many readers of this magazine would have difficulty even saying "our common humanity" without an ironic edge. Lacking faith that a wide audience will approach their art with trust and goodwill, highlow artists turn precious and diffident.
Martin Amis, Jonathan Demme, Laurie Anderson, David Lynch, and David Byrne all rummage through lowbrow as dispassionately as they would through a clothes hamper, fascinated by unsorted "Americana". While they have had successes---*Money*, *Something Wild*, the early episodes of *Twin Peaks*---their common failing is a tendency to avoid what they see as the chasm in the middle. But that bellying middle is the funnel through which all great art, either on its way up or its way down, must pass. So the work of Amis et al. will, in time, seem increasingly marginal; art that is only slumming has no claim on greatness...
Susan Sontag wrote of camp, the harbinger of high-low, that it "incarnates a victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality, of irony over tragedy". Middlebrow exactly reverses that formula---its emphasis is on content, an accessible message. Often that message is just one emotion: being misunderstood (James Dean), dreamy (Monet), in love with someone who wears a beret and reads Roland Barthes (Doisneau).