"That Exposure Is One of the Foundational Tasks of Criticism"

"Macdonald thought that people were being tricked into buying this stuff by being told that they ought to like it, or that it was good for them. He thought that, like kitsch, Midcult was a marketing phenomenon. It was culture manufactured for the aspiring sophisticate.
"In the case of kitsch, no one was being fooled. Lowbrow culture was produced in order to make a profit, and it was bought in order to provide simple pleasure and diversion. No one pretended otherwise. What alarmed Macdonald was that in the case of Midcult everyone seemed to be fooled—not only the readers but the writers, the editors, the publishers, and the reviewers. They had all become convinced of their own high-mindedness. They believed that they were engaged in an uplifting enterprise of human betterment, even as they raked in the profits."

In a 2011 New Yorker article, Louis Menand writes about Dwight Macdonald's "commitment to exposing the self-promotion, self-satisfaction, and self-delusion that are always wrapped up in the business of making and appreciating art."