Mass culture, not high art, best captured 1950s everyday American reality.

Evidence

If there is “realism” in the 1950s, in other words, it is presumably to be found there, in mass cultural representation, the only kind of art willing (and able) to deal with the stifling Eisenhower realities of the happy family in the small town, of normalcy and nondeviant everyday life. High art apparently cannot deal with this kind of subject matter except by way of the oppositional: the satire of Lewis, the pathos and solitude of Hopper or Sherwood Anderson. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 612

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses Adorno’s dismissal of mass culture as escapist ideology; connects to reader’s interest in how cultural form reflects economic base.