I agree with you that egalitarianism of taste is misguided; at the same time, I think part of the problem is that a lot of people (not you!) fail to make certain key distinctions.
1. People fail to distinguish "is this GOOD?" from "do I ENJOY this?". I think Henry James is a remarkable writer: I have read several of his books, and I can see the sheer intellectual and artistic force behind them. At the same time, I personally find Henry James a crashing bore. I can see the brilliance in his works, but it isn't a kind of brilliance that appeals to me at all. I hope I will never read another Henry James novel in my life: I would much prefer to read (say) Ian Rankin, even though I do not consider him a "greater writer" than James - not even close.
2. People fail to distinguish "is this good?" from "is this admired by elites?". Plenty of works that were initially despised by elites and have been supported "only" by popular favor, have belatedly received admiration across the board. I am old enough to remember when (for example) Tolkien was despised by literary critics, and Sergio Leone by film critics. I not only enjoyed but also admired (cf. distinction 1 above) both of them from early on, and I feel that my taste has been vindicated by their belated canonization.
Conversely, works admired by elites have sometimes not stood the test of time. The work of Wagner's that was most beloved by the elite audiences of his lifetime was Rienzi, which Wagner himself repudiated and which is (justifiably) hardly ever performed nowadays.
3. Relatedly, people fail to distinguish "is this a highbrow genre?" from "are these works valuable?" There are a lot of really terrible operas (cf. Rienzi ...), there are a lot of really terrible avant-garde movies. In the case of opera, the worst have been mostly weeded out of the repertoire, but as the repertoire expands to include new works or revivals of forgotten old works (which, I emphasize, I think is a good thing!), a significant number of those are not very good.
Conversely, there are plenty of works in genres that have traditionally been perceived as lowbrow which only needed sustained critical attention for their worth to be seen. From that perspective, it is a good thing that elites are paying more attention to (e.g.) popular music, or television, and even if it comes out of a kind of false egalitarianism, it may nevertheless have salutary effects.
4. One needs to distinguish "is this good?" from "is this easy to appreciate?". This is, to my mind, the root of the problems you identify. Some great works are easy to appreciate - I would challenge anyone with even a minimal familiarity with Western music not to love the first movement of Mozart's 40th symphony at an immediate hearing. But others need a lot more education and background: Mozart's string quintets are phenomenal, but you need to have the trained ear to hear what is going on in order to get anywhere with them. And that is not even to mention the works that are even more challenging, because they make innovative use of language or sound or visuals, or because they come from an unfamiliar time or place.
But the kind of egalitarianism which flattens everything into "all tastes are equal" discourages people from getting the education. Why struggle to learn the language of Chaucer, or to understand harmony and counterpoint, if you can get something just as valuable by listening to or reading or watching the works you were going to listen to or read or watch anyway? For those of us who believe passionately that there are works that are simply better than others, our biggest problem is to persuade people that that effort is indeed worthwhile.
And while there can't be a single solution to that problem, constantly insisting on differentiating good works from bad, as you do, Henry, is surely essential. But also, while insisting on this, encouraging people to cultivate their OWN tastes, to make their OWN differentiations. Ask them to distinguish "good" from "enjoyable", and if, having made that distinction, they still think that certain works they like are "good", challenge them to tell you WHY ... That way they will not simply be replicating the tastes of certain social or intellectual elites, but thinking critically and seriously about the works they know as well as those that, through education, they may come to know.
Excellent points. My equivalent of Henry James is Jane Austen. I remember breathing a sigh of relief in class when Tom Shipped said something along the lines of "No one can question Jane Austen's mastery of the English language, but she writes about boring people doing boring things." But if course what is boring is subjective, and I still have to admit that by any objective criteria of literary excellence, Pride and Prejudice is great writing - it's just that the subject matter could only sustain my interest long enough to watch the film (and then probably only because of Kiera Knightley).
I think it's important not to overemphasize the tastes of cultural elites, whose tastes are highly subject to the forces of trends, signaling, and historical happenstance which are at best irrelevant to the ultimate quality of a work, and instead focus on the artistic evaluation of working artists and craftsman within the medium in question. After all, these people are pretty uncontroversially the experts in their medium, and we see their tastes diverge from those in cultural elites in pretty radical ways.
Using music as an example, it's true that you'd be hard-pressed to find a working musician, especially a working composer, who didn't hold Bach in extremely high regard. But the trends in elite listening tend to begin and end with the baroque, classical, and romantic periods, with no regard for the genius of later composers like Shostakovich, Holst, or Stravinsky. And this is still only restricting ourselves to the broader western classical canon! If we move even farther from the tastes of cultural elites and closer to the tastes of musical elites, you can find this same reverence held for artists of all sorts of traditions: for Ellington and Coltrane, for the Beatles, for James Brown, and so on. All that is to say, I think it's shortsighted, and even harmful to the notion of promoting great art, to use elite tastes as a signpost when we have the words of working experts to work off of instead.
Maybe the tastes of the cultural elite simply take a while to catch up to those of the experts? If they once disregarded 20th-century composers, I don't believe that's the case now. Back when I was a student a decade ago, student tickets for the New York Philharmonic would open up based on how many regular tickets were purchased. And it was just as hard to get them for Shostakovich's Fifth as for Beethoven's.
Come to think, it doesn’t even work that easily in classical music. The musical taste of a straw blue-blooded Boston aristocrat is much better than that of, say, Pierre Boulez, at least for most people’s purposes. And Holst and Stravinsky are received rapturously wherever they’re performed, anyway. It’s not audiences’ fault that they’re correct that Beethoven is much better.
The new deputy prime minister: "Beautiful? Beautiful means nothing really, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another."
Is Angela Rayner bidding in a market for ordinariness? I would almost prefer that she was. Because it would be better than if she were just plain ordinary - which would be troubling, given the substantial influence she now has over the lives of others.
Hard agree. I’ve also been thinking about this in the context of teaching/learning how to write. There are so very many courses out there, often with an emphasis on self-expression-plus-some-rules (mostly ‘show don’t tell’). Partly that just a feature of a market, which is fine. But what I want, unashamedly, is to learn from the best, and be ambitious for what I write - and though I’m genuinely not ashamed of that, I’m embarrassed to admit to it in many writing contexts, because, well, it’s a bit elitist, is it not.
Did you ever get around to reading The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes? It touches on similar themes to this (and the idea of late bloomers!)
I’m always slightly nervous about recommending it IRL because it sounds like such a dry book but it’s really not! Just a fascinating and very moving book.
I love this piece. This also feels like the perfect place to ask for suggestions - is there a particularly good way in to some more highbrow reading?
I do read for pleasure, but usually for plot. I bounced off some classics as a teenager. Now I seem, finally, to have the patience for something that requires more effort, and I'd like to train that muscle a bit. Is it even right to think that highbrow = more effort?
There are a lot of Substacks focused on reading and truly engaging with classics and good literature, not least among them the Shakespeare Club here. Simon Haisell, who is leading year-long group reads of War and Peace and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy, is maintaining a list of a lot of those groups; you might look there and see if any of the groups appeal to you. Some of my upcoming group reads on Substack are Crime and Punishment with The Big Read, Jane Eyre with Reading Revisited, and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont with Close Reads.
Day-to-day I mostly read nonfiction with periodic forays into sci-fi and fantasy. I adore Terry Pratchett, and I'm enjoying Tolkien right now having bounced off as a child. I've read a little H G Wells, which was satisfying although I probably wouldn't reread it anytime soon.
By contrast, I gave Salman Rushdie a go last year and it felt like every page held some profound truth that I'd never understand - didn't get very far with that.
Do you think what is considered “highbrow culture” changes over time? And how does that change their perceived “greatness”?
Ex, novels being seen as frivolous, operas much the same, with elites drifting in and out, there for the social gathering over the performance.
Also, something more specific. Can there be great artistry in low-brow art? (I’m thinking of the practical effects in the film “The Thing” - a low-brow body horror movie that a lot of incredible artists worked on doing revolutionary things)
Wow, the line between elite and not is enjoying Shakespeare? Sad commentary, or maybe I’m just an elite. Coulda fooled me when I saw my first Shakespeare on a gravel beach of the Russian River (granted, the most culturally elite girl in our rural high school dragged me to it). I thought it was magic, even if I didn’t understand all of it. (Twelfth Night, I think. Or maybe Midsummer.)
I don’t agree with your conclusion that “we need elites to promote the value of the wonderful culture they are enjoying in private”. The idea that we should look to the “elites” (whoever they even are in this day and age) to provide some sort of tutelage in great art to us, the masses, is pretty antiquated. And then, would it even work? The “Whos Who” includes a number of people most of us have never even heard of. If [insert elites here] were transparent and discussed how much they love Bach, would we really see an uptick in meaningful engagement with his compositions?
I also don’t think it should just go without saying that nothing found in a village hall could possibly be as accomplished as the works in the National Gallery. So many incredible works (often by minority groups) don’t make it to such an establishment. The art we consider among the greatest today came to us not by sheer talent alone but also by a great deal of luck.
Yes, great art should be enjoyed by as many people as possible but let’s not entirely dismiss systems of power.
Also, many now 'great artists' lived in penury because even the elite hated their work! Let's abolish the word art and just refer to entertainment. That would take the edge off Henry's argument.
One issue is that what elites used to consider "good art" was partially just whatever upper class Europeans created. Eg. French cuisine is extremely overrated, and today's elites get to experience much better Asian food
My favorite place to eat is probably an asian food hall, but the only semi religious food experience I ever had was eating a steak with potato dauphinoise in Paris, and it wasn't even the steak that did it.
I swear there was a time when elites loved to talk of 'peasant food'. and on the flipside, i once knew someone who said earnestly that sampling classical music makes it better (i dont think she was trolling), and my 14 year old self might have agreed.
Perspective is constantly in danger from malign influence, isnt it. we better all get to know our inner snob.
> The counterweight to this philistine supremacy too often comes from people who are snobbish in other ways, such as Ryan Ruby who claimed on Twitter recently that reading Lolita is a moral test.
Terrific piece. I've come to embrace the pretentious label, after years of being harassed for my taste in literature. On the one hand, I'm happy to see anyone reading. On the other hand, I think it's important that we nudge folks towards the great works of the Western tradition - Dickens and Dostoevsky and Malory and Proust and so on. We need to create an intellectual culture in which people feel embarrassed for not reading the classics.
Agree that it’s a mistake to pretend that all art is equally good. Art quality is both objective and subjective and it’s a fascinating tension that has always existed. But I found most of these points a miss - turn on a classical station - you can’t get away from Mozart and Bach if you wanted to! No one is hiding them. There are basically no barriers now to enjoying amazing art and that’s great.
There is such a thing as great taste, and it’s both innate and cultivated (another tension). I grant you today we value someone having great taste less than we have in the past… because we have a more egalitarian overall culture and overall that’s better. I wouldn’t mind a little more pushback / promotion of good taste but I also think there are plenty of bubbles and subcultures where that is still a thing.
Also I’m a big fan of Taylor Swift and think you can’t possibly accurately access her impact at this moment. Give it a decade and then get back to me. I think you are succumbing to similar mistakes contemporaries made about popular artists in the past - who have stood the test of time.
I agree with all of this! Have made similar points elsewhere. My views of T Swift are merely that she is not going to be viewed by later generations as a poet. As a huge admirer of Dickens, Tolkien etc, I'm aware of the popularity-assessment problem. All my piece is really saying is that despite the truth of your first para we are not more highbrow and that is, possibly, because of your second para, as outlined in the book I reviewed.
I think there are two trends that have helped spread this idea in literature: the rise of genre fiction (mainly fantasy) and the aversion towards "old white men."
The former has led people to read merely for plot/spice rather than asking/answering lasting questions. I enjoy reading fantasy books and it was largely the reason for getting back into reading. But I always look back at them wanting more depth (LotR excluded). Most have become Marvel movies on paper.
The latter has led many people to avoid the classics as they are written by the modern day undesirables. I'm all for pruning and then expanding the canon to get the best of the best in the world of literature. But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
There are more babies lurking in the genre fiction bathwater than just Tolkien though! Nabokov, Dickens, Le Guin, Dick, Pelevin, O’Brian, Foster Wallace, Leonard, Amis… and that’s just a cursory scan of my bookshelves…
Oh absolutely! I was focused mainly on fantasy since that's what I've been most drawn to since I pick reading back up. I have tried several new works and am underwhelmed. I wouldn't say all genre fiction is failing at depth, just what seems to be popular at the moment is getting closer to Marvel on paper. I'll just stick to the classics for now, I'm not lacking books to read.
Yup, the scarcity is definitely time rather than reading matter. I tend to go the same way as you, unless I have very good reason to try something contemporary. But there is something wonderful (and vanishingly rare) about reading a book that is doing something brilliant that has never — could never have — been done before.
I agree that the condemnation poured down on these people is a bit ‘after the event’. I mean mass literacy is relatively new and most people couldn’t read or write anyway. Now we’ve all got these blessings why don’t we raise our (collective) game?!
It’s more of a way into criticism to appraise popular products. The idea that if you can understand the production of Swift you might then be able to appriase or consider other offerings of different apparent worth and what they might mean to you rather than using art as a means to maintain your place in the pecking order or indeed to embarrass others using their ignorance as a weapon which of course does happen. It is of course a way of hiding wealth and privilege - probably better than ‘let them eat cake’.
The taste makers of the West, whom many others followed, have been destructive to the arts, and in their place have given the world mostly junk.
By the way, the term elites is misapplied and ought to be consigned to the dustbin of political history. The epithet was originally used by the Rand Corporation in the 1950s to designate top echelon cadres in the communist parties of the USSR and China.
Most of the taste makers over the past fifty years have been Leftists. They are not highbrow, but lowbrow.
I agree with you that egalitarianism of taste is misguided; at the same time, I think part of the problem is that a lot of people (not you!) fail to make certain key distinctions.
1. People fail to distinguish "is this GOOD?" from "do I ENJOY this?". I think Henry James is a remarkable writer: I have read several of his books, and I can see the sheer intellectual and artistic force behind them. At the same time, I personally find Henry James a crashing bore. I can see the brilliance in his works, but it isn't a kind of brilliance that appeals to me at all. I hope I will never read another Henry James novel in my life: I would much prefer to read (say) Ian Rankin, even though I do not consider him a "greater writer" than James - not even close.
2. People fail to distinguish "is this good?" from "is this admired by elites?". Plenty of works that were initially despised by elites and have been supported "only" by popular favor, have belatedly received admiration across the board. I am old enough to remember when (for example) Tolkien was despised by literary critics, and Sergio Leone by film critics. I not only enjoyed but also admired (cf. distinction 1 above) both of them from early on, and I feel that my taste has been vindicated by their belated canonization.
Conversely, works admired by elites have sometimes not stood the test of time. The work of Wagner's that was most beloved by the elite audiences of his lifetime was Rienzi, which Wagner himself repudiated and which is (justifiably) hardly ever performed nowadays.
3. Relatedly, people fail to distinguish "is this a highbrow genre?" from "are these works valuable?" There are a lot of really terrible operas (cf. Rienzi ...), there are a lot of really terrible avant-garde movies. In the case of opera, the worst have been mostly weeded out of the repertoire, but as the repertoire expands to include new works or revivals of forgotten old works (which, I emphasize, I think is a good thing!), a significant number of those are not very good.
Conversely, there are plenty of works in genres that have traditionally been perceived as lowbrow which only needed sustained critical attention for their worth to be seen. From that perspective, it is a good thing that elites are paying more attention to (e.g.) popular music, or television, and even if it comes out of a kind of false egalitarianism, it may nevertheless have salutary effects.
4. One needs to distinguish "is this good?" from "is this easy to appreciate?". This is, to my mind, the root of the problems you identify. Some great works are easy to appreciate - I would challenge anyone with even a minimal familiarity with Western music not to love the first movement of Mozart's 40th symphony at an immediate hearing. But others need a lot more education and background: Mozart's string quintets are phenomenal, but you need to have the trained ear to hear what is going on in order to get anywhere with them. And that is not even to mention the works that are even more challenging, because they make innovative use of language or sound or visuals, or because they come from an unfamiliar time or place.
But the kind of egalitarianism which flattens everything into "all tastes are equal" discourages people from getting the education. Why struggle to learn the language of Chaucer, or to understand harmony and counterpoint, if you can get something just as valuable by listening to or reading or watching the works you were going to listen to or read or watch anyway? For those of us who believe passionately that there are works that are simply better than others, our biggest problem is to persuade people that that effort is indeed worthwhile.
And while there can't be a single solution to that problem, constantly insisting on differentiating good works from bad, as you do, Henry, is surely essential. But also, while insisting on this, encouraging people to cultivate their OWN tastes, to make their OWN differentiations. Ask them to distinguish "good" from "enjoyable", and if, having made that distinction, they still think that certain works they like are "good", challenge them to tell you WHY ... That way they will not simply be replicating the tastes of certain social or intellectual elites, but thinking critically and seriously about the works they know as well as those that, through education, they may come to know.
Excellent points. My equivalent of Henry James is Jane Austen. I remember breathing a sigh of relief in class when Tom Shipped said something along the lines of "No one can question Jane Austen's mastery of the English language, but she writes about boring people doing boring things." But if course what is boring is subjective, and I still have to admit that by any objective criteria of literary excellence, Pride and Prejudice is great writing - it's just that the subject matter could only sustain my interest long enough to watch the film (and then probably only because of Kiera Knightley).
Shipped -> Shippey
I think it's important not to overemphasize the tastes of cultural elites, whose tastes are highly subject to the forces of trends, signaling, and historical happenstance which are at best irrelevant to the ultimate quality of a work, and instead focus on the artistic evaluation of working artists and craftsman within the medium in question. After all, these people are pretty uncontroversially the experts in their medium, and we see their tastes diverge from those in cultural elites in pretty radical ways.
Using music as an example, it's true that you'd be hard-pressed to find a working musician, especially a working composer, who didn't hold Bach in extremely high regard. But the trends in elite listening tend to begin and end with the baroque, classical, and romantic periods, with no regard for the genius of later composers like Shostakovich, Holst, or Stravinsky. And this is still only restricting ourselves to the broader western classical canon! If we move even farther from the tastes of cultural elites and closer to the tastes of musical elites, you can find this same reverence held for artists of all sorts of traditions: for Ellington and Coltrane, for the Beatles, for James Brown, and so on. All that is to say, I think it's shortsighted, and even harmful to the notion of promoting great art, to use elite tastes as a signpost when we have the words of working experts to work off of instead.
Maybe the tastes of the cultural elite simply take a while to catch up to those of the experts? If they once disregarded 20th-century composers, I don't believe that's the case now. Back when I was a student a decade ago, student tickets for the New York Philharmonic would open up based on how many regular tickets were purchased. And it was just as hard to get them for Shostakovich's Fifth as for Beethoven's.
This works well enough in classical music. But in some fields [painting] the experts are idiots!
Come to think, it doesn’t even work that easily in classical music. The musical taste of a straw blue-blooded Boston aristocrat is much better than that of, say, Pierre Boulez, at least for most people’s purposes. And Holst and Stravinsky are received rapturously wherever they’re performed, anyway. It’s not audiences’ fault that they’re correct that Beethoven is much better.
The new deputy prime minister: "Beautiful? Beautiful means nothing really, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another."
Is Angela Rayner bidding in a market for ordinariness? I would almost prefer that she was. Because it would be better than if she were just plain ordinary - which would be troubling, given the substantial influence she now has over the lives of others.
Hard agree. I’ve also been thinking about this in the context of teaching/learning how to write. There are so very many courses out there, often with an emphasis on self-expression-plus-some-rules (mostly ‘show don’t tell’). Partly that just a feature of a market, which is fine. But what I want, unashamedly, is to learn from the best, and be ambitious for what I write - and though I’m genuinely not ashamed of that, I’m embarrassed to admit to it in many writing contexts, because, well, it’s a bit elitist, is it not.
yes! that's what I liked about 'The Late Americans' by Brandon Taylor
Did you ever get around to reading The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes? It touches on similar themes to this (and the idea of late bloomers!)
All of his work is on my list for the near future!
Great book that
I’m always slightly nervous about recommending it IRL because it sounds like such a dry book but it’s really not! Just a fascinating and very moving book.
I love this piece. This also feels like the perfect place to ask for suggestions - is there a particularly good way in to some more highbrow reading?
I do read for pleasure, but usually for plot. I bounced off some classics as a teenager. Now I seem, finally, to have the patience for something that requires more effort, and I'd like to train that muscle a bit. Is it even right to think that highbrow = more effort?
There are a lot of Substacks focused on reading and truly engaging with classics and good literature, not least among them the Shakespeare Club here. Simon Haisell, who is leading year-long group reads of War and Peace and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy, is maintaining a list of a lot of those groups; you might look there and see if any of the groups appeal to you. Some of my upcoming group reads on Substack are Crime and Punishment with The Big Read, Jane Eyre with Reading Revisited, and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont with Close Reads.
What sort of thing do you enjoy?
Day-to-day I mostly read nonfiction with periodic forays into sci-fi and fantasy. I adore Terry Pratchett, and I'm enjoying Tolkien right now having bounced off as a child. I've read a little H G Wells, which was satisfying although I probably wouldn't reread it anytime soon.
By contrast, I gave Salman Rushdie a go last year and it felt like every page held some profound truth that I'd never understand - didn't get very far with that.
Le Guin?
Think I have one of hers in my reading mountain. I'll give it a go!
Do you think what is considered “highbrow culture” changes over time? And how does that change their perceived “greatness”?
Ex, novels being seen as frivolous, operas much the same, with elites drifting in and out, there for the social gathering over the performance.
Also, something more specific. Can there be great artistry in low-brow art? (I’m thinking of the practical effects in the film “The Thing” - a low-brow body horror movie that a lot of incredible artists worked on doing revolutionary things)
Wow, the line between elite and not is enjoying Shakespeare? Sad commentary, or maybe I’m just an elite. Coulda fooled me when I saw my first Shakespeare on a gravel beach of the Russian River (granted, the most culturally elite girl in our rural high school dragged me to it). I thought it was magic, even if I didn’t understand all of it. (Twelfth Night, I think. Or maybe Midsummer.)
I don’t agree with your conclusion that “we need elites to promote the value of the wonderful culture they are enjoying in private”. The idea that we should look to the “elites” (whoever they even are in this day and age) to provide some sort of tutelage in great art to us, the masses, is pretty antiquated. And then, would it even work? The “Whos Who” includes a number of people most of us have never even heard of. If [insert elites here] were transparent and discussed how much they love Bach, would we really see an uptick in meaningful engagement with his compositions?
I also don’t think it should just go without saying that nothing found in a village hall could possibly be as accomplished as the works in the National Gallery. So many incredible works (often by minority groups) don’t make it to such an establishment. The art we consider among the greatest today came to us not by sheer talent alone but also by a great deal of luck.
Yes, great art should be enjoyed by as many people as possible but let’s not entirely dismiss systems of power.
Also, many now 'great artists' lived in penury because even the elite hated their work! Let's abolish the word art and just refer to entertainment. That would take the edge off Henry's argument.
One issue is that what elites used to consider "good art" was partially just whatever upper class Europeans created. Eg. French cuisine is extremely overrated, and today's elites get to experience much better Asian food
My favorite place to eat is probably an asian food hall, but the only semi religious food experience I ever had was eating a steak with potato dauphinoise in Paris, and it wasn't even the steak that did it.
I swear there was a time when elites loved to talk of 'peasant food'. and on the flipside, i once knew someone who said earnestly that sampling classical music makes it better (i dont think she was trolling), and my 14 year old self might have agreed.
Perspective is constantly in danger from malign influence, isnt it. we better all get to know our inner snob.
> The counterweight to this philistine supremacy too often comes from people who are snobbish in other ways, such as Ryan Ruby who claimed on Twitter recently that reading Lolita is a moral test.
Saying such things is an IQ test. He failed.
Terrific piece. I've come to embrace the pretentious label, after years of being harassed for my taste in literature. On the one hand, I'm happy to see anyone reading. On the other hand, I think it's important that we nudge folks towards the great works of the Western tradition - Dickens and Dostoevsky and Malory and Proust and so on. We need to create an intellectual culture in which people feel embarrassed for not reading the classics.
Agree that it’s a mistake to pretend that all art is equally good. Art quality is both objective and subjective and it’s a fascinating tension that has always existed. But I found most of these points a miss - turn on a classical station - you can’t get away from Mozart and Bach if you wanted to! No one is hiding them. There are basically no barriers now to enjoying amazing art and that’s great.
There is such a thing as great taste, and it’s both innate and cultivated (another tension). I grant you today we value someone having great taste less than we have in the past… because we have a more egalitarian overall culture and overall that’s better. I wouldn’t mind a little more pushback / promotion of good taste but I also think there are plenty of bubbles and subcultures where that is still a thing.
Also I’m a big fan of Taylor Swift and think you can’t possibly accurately access her impact at this moment. Give it a decade and then get back to me. I think you are succumbing to similar mistakes contemporaries made about popular artists in the past - who have stood the test of time.
I agree with all of this! Have made similar points elsewhere. My views of T Swift are merely that she is not going to be viewed by later generations as a poet. As a huge admirer of Dickens, Tolkien etc, I'm aware of the popularity-assessment problem. All my piece is really saying is that despite the truth of your first para we are not more highbrow and that is, possibly, because of your second para, as outlined in the book I reviewed.
I think there are two trends that have helped spread this idea in literature: the rise of genre fiction (mainly fantasy) and the aversion towards "old white men."
The former has led people to read merely for plot/spice rather than asking/answering lasting questions. I enjoy reading fantasy books and it was largely the reason for getting back into reading. But I always look back at them wanting more depth (LotR excluded). Most have become Marvel movies on paper.
The latter has led many people to avoid the classics as they are written by the modern day undesirables. I'm all for pruning and then expanding the canon to get the best of the best in the world of literature. But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
There are more babies lurking in the genre fiction bathwater than just Tolkien though! Nabokov, Dickens, Le Guin, Dick, Pelevin, O’Brian, Foster Wallace, Leonard, Amis… and that’s just a cursory scan of my bookshelves…
(Admittedly, I am biased, being a purveyor of the stuff myself: https://pulpstack.substack.com/)
Oh absolutely! I was focused mainly on fantasy since that's what I've been most drawn to since I pick reading back up. I have tried several new works and am underwhelmed. I wouldn't say all genre fiction is failing at depth, just what seems to be popular at the moment is getting closer to Marvel on paper. I'll just stick to the classics for now, I'm not lacking books to read.
Yup, the scarcity is definitely time rather than reading matter. I tend to go the same way as you, unless I have very good reason to try something contemporary. But there is something wonderful (and vanishingly rare) about reading a book that is doing something brilliant that has never — could never have — been done before.
I agree that the condemnation poured down on these people is a bit ‘after the event’. I mean mass literacy is relatively new and most people couldn’t read or write anyway. Now we’ve all got these blessings why don’t we raise our (collective) game?!
It’s more of a way into criticism to appraise popular products. The idea that if you can understand the production of Swift you might then be able to appriase or consider other offerings of different apparent worth and what they might mean to you rather than using art as a means to maintain your place in the pecking order or indeed to embarrass others using their ignorance as a weapon which of course does happen. It is of course a way of hiding wealth and privilege - probably better than ‘let them eat cake’.
The taste makers of the West, whom many others followed, have been destructive to the arts, and in their place have given the world mostly junk.
By the way, the term elites is misapplied and ought to be consigned to the dustbin of political history. The epithet was originally used by the Rand Corporation in the 1950s to designate top echelon cadres in the communist parties of the USSR and China.
Most of the taste makers over the past fifty years have been Leftists. They are not highbrow, but lowbrow.