204
DWIGHT MACDONALD
Providence;/But wait not for more than enough, for marriage
is the DUTY of most men.") to Norman Vincent Peale.
(Thinkers like H. G. Wells, Stuart Chase, and Max Lerner come
under the head of Midcult rather than Masscult.) And the
enormous output of such new media as the radio, television and
the movies is almost entirely Masscult.
I
This is something new in history. It is not that so much
bad art
is
being produced. Most High Culture has been undis–
tinguished, since talent
is
always rare-one has only to walk
through any great art museum or try to read some of the for–
gotten books from past centuries. Since only the best works still
have currency, one thinks of the past in their terms, but they
were really just a few plums in a vast tasteless pudding of
mediocrity.
Masscult
is
bad
in
a new way: it doesn't even have the
theoretical possibility of being good. Up to the 18th century,
bad art was of the same nature as good art, produced for the
same audience, accepting the same standards. The difference
was simply one of individual talent. But Masscult
is
something
else again. It is not just unsuccessful art. It is non-art. It is even
anti-art.
There is a novel of the masses but no Stendhal of the masses;
a music for the masses but no Bach or Beethoven, whatever people
say. " [Andre Malraux observes in "Art, Popular Art and the
Illusion of the
Folk"-(Partisan Review,
Sept.-Oct. 1951)] ... It is
odd that no word . . . designates the common character of what
we call, separately, bad painting, bad architecture, bad music, etc.
The word "painting" only designates a domain in which art
is
possible . . . Perhaps we have only one word because bad painting
has not existed for very long. There is no bad Gothic painting. Not
that all Gothic painting is good. But the difference that separates
Giotto from the most mediocre of his imitators is not of the same
kind as that which separates Renoir from the caricaturists of
La
