"Surrealism Reimagined as Disneyland"

"Macdonald—an anti-Communist Leftist who had been turning his energies from politics to culture in the 1950s—was worried about the place of the arts in a modern, democratic society. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to worry about. Macdonald was appalled by the cheapening of art and literature in a big, complex, contemporary culture, about the extent to which people were being fed—and, sometimes it seemed, force-fed—a preprocessed, easy-to-digest version of art, literature, theater, and music. This was what he called 'masscult,' which was 'at best a vulgarized reflection of High Culture and at worst a cultural nightmare.' Instead of Old Master paintings, people were getting Norman Rockwell. Instead of Bach and Mozart, they were getting the Boston Pops. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there was also midcult to contend with. Midcult was a newer idea, a mid-century variation on the phenomenon of mass culture. Midcult, Macdonald argued, 'pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.'"

Jed Perl in The New Republic revisits Dwight Macdonald's 1961 essay "Masscult and Midcult."