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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

The Struggle Over Middlebrow

September 8, 2011 by Scott Timberg

I JUST finished a very intriguing Louis Menand piece on culture critic Dwight Macdonald and the notion of middlebrow. (For those Easterners snorting that I am getting to the story so tardily, let me quote my friend and fellow Angeleno Manohla Dargis, who says that most weeks we get the New Yorker so late it seems to’ve been delivered by pony express.)

The notion of cultural hierarchy — which works are good, which are “good for” us, and so on — has fascinated me for a long time and had shaped a lot of my cultural journalism. I engaged with the highbrow-middlebow-lowbrow question in a reported essay for the LA Times that I expected no one would read. Instead, I heard more from it than almost anything I’ve written.

HERE is the piece, which begins in a discussion of Macdonald’s writings on middlebrow and Clement Greenberg’s “Avant Garde and Kitsch.” (The pugnacious but also supportive relationship between the Ivy League-ish anarchist Macdonald and Jewish art critic Greenberg is a big part of Menand’s piece.)

This is the kind of piece that I consider the beginning (or continuation) of the discussion — it’s hard to have the last word on anything as complex and ever changing as culture and what it does to us.

Filed Under: '50s, literary, new york, new yorker

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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