Dwight MacDonald analyzes the phenomenon of mass culture in a 1953 essay. He argues that for over a century, there have really been two cultures: high culture chronicled in textbooks, and mass culture manufactured for mass consumption like chewing gum. Mass culture developed new media such as radio, movies, and television well-suited for mass production and distribution. While mass culture began parasitically drawing from high culture, it has increasingly developed independently, imposed from above by business technicians rather than growing organically from folk art. Mass culture exploits popular tastes for profit and political control, integrating the masses into a degraded form of high culture and becoming an instrument of domination.
Dwight MacDonald analyzes the phenomenon of mass culture in a 1953 essay. He argues that for over a century, there have really been two cultures: high culture chronicled in textbooks, and mass culture manufactured for mass consumption like chewing gum. Mass culture developed new media such as radio, movies, and television well-suited for mass production and distribution. While mass culture began parasitically drawing from high culture, it has increasingly developed independently, imposed from above by business technicians rather than growing organically from folk art. Mass culture exploits popular tastes for profit and political control, integrating the masses into a degraded form of high culture and becoming an instrument of domination.
Dwight MacDonald analyzes the phenomenon of mass culture in a 1953 essay. He argues that for over a century, there have really been two cultures: high culture chronicled in textbooks, and mass culture manufactured for mass consumption like chewing gum. Mass culture developed new media such as radio, movies, and television well-suited for mass production and distribution. While mass culture began parasitically drawing from high culture, it has increasingly developed independently, imposed from above by business technicians rather than growing organically from folk art. Mass culture exploits popular tastes for profit and political control, integrating the masses into a degraded form of high culture and becoming an instrument of domination.
Dwight MacDonald analyzes the phenomenon of mass culture in a 1953 essay. He argues that for over a century, there have really been two cultures: high culture chronicled in textbooks, and mass culture manufactured for mass consumption like chewing gum. Mass culture developed new media such as radio, movies, and television well-suited for mass production and distribution. While mass culture began parasitically drawing from high culture, it has increasingly developed independently, imposed from above by business technicians rather than growing organically from folk art. Mass culture exploits popular tastes for profit and political control, integrating the masses into a degraded form of high culture and becoming an instrument of domination.
For about a century, Western culture has really been two cultures: the traditional kindlet us call it "High Culture"that is chronicled in the textbooks, and a "Mass Culture" manufactured wholesale for the market. In the old art forms, the artisans of Mass Culture have long been at work: in the novel, the line stretches from Eugene Sue to Lloyd C. Douglas; in music, from Offenbach to Tin-Pan Alley; in art from the chromo to Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell; in architecture, from Victorian Gothic to suburban Tudor. Mass Culture has also developed new media of its own, into which the serious artist rarely ventures: radio, the movies, comic books, detective stories, science fiction, television. It is sometimes called "Popular Culture," but I think "Mass Culture" a more accurate term, since its distinctive mark is that it is solely and directly an article for mass consumption, like chewing gum. A work of High Culture is occasionally popular, after all, though this is increasingly rare. Thus Dickens was even more popular than his contemporary, G. A. Henty, the difference being that he was an artist, communicating his individual vision to other individuals, while Henty was an impersonal manufacturer of an impersonal commodity for the masses.
THE NATURE OF MASS CULTURE
The historical reasons for the growth of Mass Culture since the early 1800's are well known. Political democracy and popular education broke down the old upper- class monopoly of culture. Business enterprise found a profitable market in the cultural demands of the newly awakened masses, and the advance of technology made possible the cheap production of books, periodicals, pictures, music, and furniture, in sufficient quantities to satisfy this market. Modern technology also created new media such as the movies and television which are specially well adapted to mass manufacture and distribution. The phenomenon is thus peculiar to modern times and differs radically from what was hitherto known as art or culture. It is true that Mass
Excerpts from "A Theory of Mass Culture" by Dwight MacDonald, in Diogenes, No. 3, Summer 1953, pp. 1-17. Reprinted by permission of the author. 13
Culture began as, and to some extent still is, a parasitic, a cancerous growth on High Culture. As Clement Greenberg pointed out in "Avant-garde and Kitsch" (Partisan Review, Fall, 1939); "The precondition of kitsch (a German term for Mass Culture) is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends." The connection, however, is not that of the leaf and the branch but rather that of the caterpillar and the leaf. Kitsch "mines" High Culture the way improvident frontiersmen mine the soil, extracting its riches and putting nothing back. Also, as kitsch develops, it begins to draw on its own past, and some of it evolves so far away from High Culture as to appear quite disconnected from it.
It is also true that Mass Culture is to some extent a continuation of the old Folk Art which until the Industrial Revolution was the culture of the common people, but here, too, the differences are more striking than the similarities. Folk Art grew from below. It was a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without the benefit of High Culture, to suit their own needs. Mass Culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by business; its audiences are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying. The Lords of kitsch, in short, exploit the cultural needs of the masses in order to make a profit and/or to maintain their class rulein Communist countries, only the second purpose obtains. (It is very different to satisfy popular tastes, as Robert Burns' poetry did, and to exploit them, as Hollywood does.) Folk Art was the people's own institution, their private little garden walled off from the great formal park of their masters' High Culture. But Mass Culture breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into a debased form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of political domination. If one had no other data to go on, the nature of Mass Culture would reveal capitalism to be an exploitive class society and not the harmonious commonwealth it is sometimes alleged to be. The same goes even more strongly for Soviet Communism and its special kind of Mass Culture. . . .
GRESHAM'S LAW IN CULTURE
The separation of Folk Art and High Culture in fairly watertight compartments corresponded to the sharp line once drawn between the common people and the aristocracy. The eruption of the masses onto the
