Modernism’s utopian function was securing authentic experience against mass culture

Evidence

What can at least be admitted is the more universal presence of this particular feature, which appears more unambiguously in the other arts as an effacement of the older distinction between high and so-called mass culture, a distinction on which modernism depended for its specificity, its Utopian function consisting at least in part in the securing of a realm of authentic experience over against the surrounding environment of middleand low-brow commercial culture. … Indeed, it can be argued that the emergence of high modernism is itself contemporaneous with the first great expansion of a recognizably mass culture (Zola may be taken as the marker for the last coexistence of the art novel and the best-seller within a single text). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 193

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds directly the reader’s stated key idea that aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing — modernism’s autonomy is causally tied to mass culture’s expansion. — connects to: Modernist art redeems reification’s fragments as Utopian compensation — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 5942; Schiller’s utopian synthesis of naive and sentimental art remained mere costume drama
• SEED: The Zola marker — the last moment a single text could be both art novel and best-seller — is a concrete diagnostic for periodizing shifts in cultural production and could anchor an essay.