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A Theory of Mass Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Dwight Macdonald
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Extract

For about a century, Western culture has really been two cultures: the traditional kind—let 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 Eugène Süe 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , June 1953 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © 1953 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 As I did myself in ‘A Theory of Popular Culture' (Politics, February, 1944) parts of which have been used or adapted in the present article.

2 The success of Reader's Digest illustrates the law. Here is a magazine that has achieved a fantastic circulation—some fifteen millions, much of which is accounted for by its foreign editions, thus showing that kitsch by no means appeals only to Americans-simply by reducing to even lower terms the already superficial formula of other periodicals. By treating a theme in two pages which they treat in six the Digest becomes three times as ‘readable' and three times as superficial.