[PREV - DWIGHT_MAC]    [TOP]

AGAINST_THE_MIDDLE

                                             November 20-30, 2012

Dwight Macdonald and Pauline Kael:
a critic/anti-critic pair with            I began reading Dwight
diametrically opposing prejudices.        Macdonald around the same
                                          time that Pauline Kael was
Pauline Kael, the great                   undergoing (another?)
advocate of low art, and                  revival, hence this
Macdonald one of the last                 pairing in my mind.
defenders of the high ground.
                                              But actually, they were
   But both have some                         rough contemporaries,
   commonalities:                             and I gather that they
                                              did a certain amount of
   The tendency to claim that                 sparring with each other
   you've got to do one kind of               in print.
   thing and not the other;
   An insistance on a kind of                 They faced off on at least
   purity of esthetics.                       one panel discussion (with a
                                              John Simon as third wheel),
       For Pauline Kael, that's               the recordings of which seem
       Goddard and not Bergman,               to have faded from the net.
       Altman and not Kubrick...
                                                  [link]

                                               "Macdonald comes second
                                               [after Simon], by dint,
       For Dwight Macdonald, that's            I guess, of sheer dogged
       Picasso and not Norman Rockwell...      consistency: it's difficult
       or Robert Rauschenberg.                 to trap someone in a
                                               contradiction when they
                       DWIGHT_MAC              seem to have no contradictory--
                                               or weird, or original, or
                                               interesting-- thoughts."

                                                 --Devin McKinney, June 4, 2006
                                                   [link]
   Both were enemies of pseudo-
   intellectual posing: they
   disdained what struck them as
   insincere, inauthentic claims
   to deep insight and refined
   taste.

      Kael made the accusation that many
      film critics were corrupted by a
      knowledge of what they were supposed
      to appreciate.  She praised common,
      low-brow reactions as "honest".

      Dwight MacDonald had a distaste
      for high culture marketed to
      middlebrows, what he dismissed
      as the "midcult"

          Both of them attacked that middle,
          shooting at it from high and low.


          And both of them inspire an obvious
          comment: one suspects that neither
          of them would be happy with the world
          they helped to create.

          Now that the low culture is triumphant,
          would Pauline Kael rest easy?                   DOWN_WITH_KAEL

          Now that the middle brow has all
          but disapeared, would Dwight
          Macdonald feel that his elite
          has been successfully defended?                 GREAT_BOOKS_MIDDLE_MIND




--------
[NEXT - GREAT_BOOKS_MIDDLE_MIND]