Fifties high art asserted authority by deliberately ignoring mass culture

Evidence

When the notion of the oppositional is contested, however, in the mid eighties, we will know a fifties revival in which much of this “degraded mass culture” returns for possible reevaluation. In the fifties, however, it is high culture that is still authorized to pass judgment on reality, to say what real life is and what is, on the other hand, mere appearance; and it is by leaving out, by ignoring, by passing over in silence and with the repugnance one may feel for the dreary stereotypes of television series, that high art palpably issues its judgments. Faulkner and Hemingway, the southerners and the New Yorkers, pass this small-town U.S. raw material by in a detour considerably greater than the proverbial ten-foot pole; indeed, of the great writers of the period, only Dick himself comes to mind as the virtual poet laureate of this material: of squabbling couples and marital dramas, of petit bourgeois shopkeepers, neighborhoods, and afternoons in front of television, and all the rest. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 613

Categorization

• XREF: This is the groundwork for the parody/pastiche distinction — high modernism’s repulsion-toward-mass-culture is the stance pastiche later flattens. Connects to Jameson’s broader argument about Dick (Philip K. Dick) as transitional figure. — connects to: Autonomous high art was founded on excluding the lower classes — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 106; Higher art must approach the masses by assimilating kitsch — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 874; Elites denied creative status to most people’s cultural production under capitalism — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 437