Dwight Macdonald's Masscult and Midcult in the Age of Waste.
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York Review Books Classics) eBook: Dwight Macdonald, John Summers, Louis Menand: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store.
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, a selection of Dwight Macdonald’s work from the 1950s and ’60s, includes the kinds of big, critical pronouncements that today would be.
Masscult definition, the forms of culture, as music, drama, and literature, as selected, interpreted, and popularized by the mass media for dissemination to the widest possible audience. See more.
A decade later, however, this indulgent attitude changed: the same phenomenon was reanimated and harshly criticized in the essay Masscult and Midcult by American critic Dwight Macdonald. On the importance of culture: spirituality for secular humanists.
For Macdonald, midcult was a falsity, a vicious myth which was perpetuated by the purveyors of lowbrow art, while masscult was the real deal: lowbrow tastes disseminated as lowbrow art. While the essay he wrote on these two modes of culture has been rather discredited (in no small measure) since, and is out of favour in today’s globalised, heavily commercialised world, it nevertheless struck.
About Masscult and Midcult. A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of.
Masscult definition is - the artistic and intellectual culture associated with and disseminated through the mass media: mass culture.