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Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Lawrence W. Levine

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Jun 13, 2023 Werner rated it liked it

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This book was donated to the BU library (where I work) several years ago, which put it on my radar. I've long been interested in the subject of “elite” culture in the arts (literature, film, music, and visual art), as opposed to so-called “popular” art, and its relationship to “elite” socio-economic and political ideology. Like most people who work in the library profession and/or academia, I'm exposed to this phenomenon; but I've never studied it seriously, especially not in terms of its histor This book was donated to the BU library (where I work) several years ago, which put it on my radar. I've long been interested in the subject of “elite” culture in the arts (literature, film, music, and visual art), as opposed to so-called “popular” art, and its relationship to “elite” socio-economic and political ideology. Like most people who work in the library profession and/or academia, I'm exposed to this phenomenon; but I've never studied it seriously, especially not in terms of its historical origins and development, and never read a definitive description and analysis of it. Last year, when a Goodreads group I'm in chose a so-called “literary fiction” (in the elitist sense) novel as a group read, I didn't feel that I could credibly describe its genre and situate it in terms of that context, so I chose not to review it. I concluded then that I need to actually educate myself on this subject. Hence, this read.

The body of the text here is made up of 256 pages, divided into just three chapters, with a relatively short Prologue and Epilogue. A goodly number (the credits fill a page) of black-and-white period photographs, mostly of people or groups of people and places, genuinely enhance the presentation. We're provided with an over 10-page index, and Levine documents his references in a bit over 35 pages of endnotes (the occasional added elaborations of points made in the main text are made in footnotes); but there's no bibliography as such. That's a flaw, because that would have provided a handy reference to the author's sources. However, the book does seem to be very well documented, with mostly reference to primary sources. I detected one factual error; a quote from Sidney Lanier, who died in 1881, is dated 1898 (and I don't think the quote illustrates the point being made).

Lawrence W. Levine (d. 2006) was a longtime prestigious history professor at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, and a pillar of the left-wing political establishment, who garnered numerous professional honors and awards (just four years after the 1988 publication of this book –one of at least 15 that he wrote-- he was elected president of the Organization of American Historians). In other words, he had impeccable elite credentials himself, and his publisher for this tome, Harvard Univ. Press, is about as elite as they come in American academia. (The book itself is largely based on his 1986 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard Univ.) He was eminently positioned to observe the American elite culture of his own time from the inside.

However, his focus in this book is almost entirely on the 19th century, with some reference to such early 20th-century persons and events as show the continuing outworking of late 19th-century trends. So this is not a comprehensive history of American elite culture down to the present. Levine also concentrates heavily on Shakespeare (other literature is mostly ignored), classical music and opera, and museums. Nor does he set American developments in the broader context of Western culture as a whole. What he does, though, is first solidly demonstrate that America in the antebellum years of the 19th century had a common public culture shared by the rich, middle classes and the poor, which included such components as the plays of Shakespeare and Italian operas, both of which were hugely popular with all social classes. Second, he documents how, during the later 19th century, upper class cultural arbiters backed by big money popularized a view of certain art works –Shakespeare's plays, the classical music of German composers of the 17th through the early 19th centuries, and the visual art of classical antiquity and the Old Masters-- as “high” art possessed of a quasi-sacral quality, to be received and appreciated as a supposedly morally uplifting experience apart from any entertainment value, and which the uneducated and lower-class members of the community lacked the understanding to “properly” appreciate for the “right” reasons. This was accompanied by a conscious program of segregating cultural spaces by class, with the Great Unwashed, as much as possible, kept out of venues where “high” art was performed or displayed.

Many of the actual quotes Levine cites from the men (this was largely a boy's club) driving this trend suggest to me that a big part of the appeal of embracing this position was psychological validation as a person morally and intellectually superior to the masses. And the underlying attitudes weren't without a hefty component of racism, xenophobia, and class entitlement. (The term “highbrow,” which was coined in the 1880s, and its opposite “lowbrow” are themselves drawn from the pseudo-science of phrenology, which was an integral part of the “scientific racism” of that day.) To his credit, Levine stresses that these developments were complex and multi-faceted, with causes in a wide range of socio-cultural phenomena, and are not to be reductively explained as driven only by racial/class antagonism and desire for prestige and cultural power. (Nor were the underlying concerns all necessarily illegitimate. A big motivation in the quest for greater decorum in theaters and concert halls, for instance, was the outrageous behavior of many people in early 19th-century audiences, which could consist not just of making noise that prevented others from hearing, but of throwing things at performers who displeased them, and even vandalism and violence in extreme cases like the Astor Place Riot, which I'd never heard of before.) In the closest thing he has to a thesis statement, the author writes, “If there is a tragedy in this development, it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven and Verdi... but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period –and many still have not regained-- their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.” With this view, I heartily agree!

As already noted, the focus here is on the 19th century, with relatively little reference to the 20th. (The author does make the revealing statement that, “Although this... may have been the creation of conservative elites, it became part of the intellectual equipment of many on the left later in this century,” but only in a footnote that he doesn't develop.) In the roughly 13-page Epilogue, he does try to briefly survey the state of things in 1988, noting that while there are indications of a rising tendency in some elite circles to be more eclectic and open to “popular” culture, the late 19th-century mindset still shapes most people's perceptions. Much of the Epilogue, though, oddly focuses on casting a few conservative academics, especially Allan Bloom with particular reference to his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind (which I read decades ago, but don't remember well and would need to reread to discuss intelligently), as today's spokespersons for the concept of elite culture. Bloom's position and cultural canon may resemble that of the conservative late 19th-century pundits of, say, 1888; but it's fairly obvious that the actual elite conception of 'high” culture that prevailed in 1988 was vastly different –the sense of superiority over the supposed vulgar herd and the tight link between cultural elite authority and political power and wealth remain constants, but the content of supposed “high” culture is radically redefined. (And the differences have grown greater by 2023.) Most of today's conservative cultural critics do argue for a canon (though not necessarily a closed one!) of serious works of art and thought that have stood the test of time and have continuing relevance; but they advocate this from outside the circle of elite privilege, and argue for, rather than against, the accessibility of these works to ordinary people.

Overall, this was an illuminating read; I learned a substantial amount of significant factual information I did not previously know, and picked up some serious new insights. (Because of time and space constraints, this review just scratches the surface in that respect.) That it's prompted me to want to explore the subject more with additional reading, rather than providing a definitive final treatment of it, is a good thing rather than a defect! ...more

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