The role of the critic is curious, yet contradictory: he is not required to be on par with the art or the artist he is reviewing and appraising, but the standards he creates for that art or artist are entirely his own. In other words, the true critic delves into the objet d’art to find out how much of the artist is embedded therein. He is not supposed to be the artist, only to discover the auteur beneath the individual. But then this mode of criticism belongs to the journalist, who reviews individual objets d’art (movies, plays, books, etc) in return for a stipend. There is a higher mode of criticism that exists on its own right, on which the journalist reviewer depends for a veritable horde of resources. In this mode, the critic, or writer, no longer bothers with specific works of art. He is preoccupied with the function of art, as a whole, regardless of the disparateness and uniqueness of individual artist. On a canvas he attempts to chart, and assess, not a body of work belonging to a particular filmmaker or playwright, but several bodies of work belonging to an entire art form.
Once in a while the distinction between these two modes of criticism gets blurred, often deliberately, since a critic can in the same review discuss a work of art and the history, and theory, of the art form to which that work belongs. Out of necessity perhaps, the first film critics, who were really either novelists or journalists, preferred to examine and at times lambast the art form, ignoring the individuality of the films which were being churned out by those who sought to combine the theatre and the cinema. It was only much later that this mode of criticism was overcome by the individual film reviewer: in order, Manny Farber, James Agee, and the most powerful of them all, Pauline Kael. Agee was probably the only real film critic; both Farber and Kael deigned to examine movies as an art form in essay after essay. Agee’s standards were not academic, nor were they “cinematic”: his reviews were written from the standpoint that the movies being reviewed deserved being examined as autonomous works of art, however new they were.
More often than not, nevertheless, film criticism, the youngest of all modes of criticism, opens its doors to the cultural critic, who seeks to apply standards created elsewhere, in other cultural spheres, to the movies. Among these critics we can mention Susan Sontag and Dwight Macdonald. But the fact that they apply standards created elsewhere does not mean that they automatically disparage movies as being too facile and too novel. Nor does it mean that they do not disparage them based on that crude premise. Sontag, for instance, was a champion of new avenues created by Godard, Resnais, and Cassavates, while Macdonald, described as “America’s browbeater” by Franklin Foer, was suspicious of what he thought was the cinema’s ability to compromise on sophistication through cheap, moneymaking processes. This goes back to the question I outlined at the beginning: in the movies, or for that matter in any art form, who is to decide on what is art and what is non-art? The answer to that, of course, is that we can’t find an answer. The critic vents out his or her personal opinions; he or she is entitled to them. That is all.
In his “Masscult and Midcult”, Dwight Macdonald warns against what he sees as the tendency of American culture to do away with highbrow tastes in favour of a middlebrow and lowbrow culture. He describes masscult as the culture of the masses; like Hannah Arendt, Richard Hofstadter, and C. Wright Mills, he views the masses as a negative force, obliterating specificity in favour of mass consumption and the conveyor belt. Midcult, on the other hand, is a more insidious culture, or even cult: superficially catering to higher tastes, it eventually betrays its own lack of sophistication by pandering to lowbrow tastes, in the guise of commercial art. This distinction was specifically rooted in the United States of the post-Nazi Germany world. The American proletariat, willing to submit to authority for stability, thrived on an ethic of groupthink and uniformity, and this uniformity was to be seen visibly in the American cultural sphere
Macdonald’s exercise in cultural distinctions was not a casual academic game, but a necessity compelled by what he saw as infiltrators who were attempting to evict the pre-Nazi Germany cultural sensibility. Virulently attacking the masses, along with the ability of commerce to market art to those masses through the factory and the conveyor belt, was for him an act of standing up for what he thought the artist stood for. In other words, it is in Macdonald’s controversial thesis that we find a confirmation of the myth of the artist as a loner, who shuts his doors and paints, or makes a film, or composes a song, while drowning out the sound of a nearby factory; in other words of the artist who rebels against commerce. What this necessitated was a distinction, and a sharp, unyielding one, between masscult (potboilers) and midcult (the plays of Thornton Wilder and Tennessee Williams, which depicted urban ennui as the new realism).
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 writers and artists at the time. It was felt to be a last gasp for a bygone generation: the generation of the dandies and the bohemians, the latter of whom would give way to the generation of bourgeois bohemians and pop art revolutionaries. A last gasp, because the solution Macdonald thought he found for the conflict between masscult and midcult on the one hand and highbrow culture on the other was simplistic if not naive: simply, that the highbrows must flee to their own place under the sun. No one, not in an era where advertising and Godard were courting each other, would have abided by this solution.
While no one reads Macdonald’s didactic overtures and takes them seriously today (not least because his writings are all but completely out of print now), it would be futile to exclude him from the canon of 20th century criticism altogether. Like F. R. Leavis’s distinction between mass civilisation and minority culture, masscult and midcult and highbrow culture were terms which were used to project the nostalgia of the writer towards a bygone era, and in making aesthetic judgments using those terms, Macdonald admittedly tripped over more than once. (For instance, he exempted the likes of Dickens from his list of indicted artists, forgetting that Dickens, not unlike the writers of potboiler detective fiction which Macdonald would have found almost nauseating, was a popular writer as well, at least in his day.) This was true of Leavis also. (Again we have the example of Dickens: in his early work, Leavis despised him, and wrote against him, but towards the end of his life he did a 360-turnaround on his earlier judgments, praising Dickens to the extent of inflating lesser works like Hard Times and Little Dorrit.)
Far from putting aside Leavis or Macdonald, I would suggest here that the crux of the argument they (in particular, Macdonald) put forward is the question whether art can really be separated from non-art, at least intermittently. The truth is that a work of art “survives” its own evolution by being constantly reconfigured, so what is considered art today would have hardly been art at the time of its conception (as an example, we can point at the Gal Viharaya at Polonnaruwa, which was sculpted back when worship was as essential to the daily routines of citizens and villagers as going to work is today). What binds the likes of Macdonald and Leavis together is their fixation over the distinctions between different aesthetic tastes, or levels thereof. What I can say against this line of thinking is that a work of art passes through three distinct phases: use (at the time of its initial conception), retrieval (at the time of its excavation), and study (at the time it ceases being a practical object and becomes, yes, an aesthetic object). In other words, it’s not the nature of a work of art that makes us differentiate between lowbrow and highbrow, rather the mode of communication used to convey the worth of the object to lay audiences.
Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, May 20 2018
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