MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
229
ful of Schubert's songs because its wallowing, yearning tremolos
and glissandos make it clear to the most unmusical listener
that something very tender indeed is going on.
It
does his
feeling for him; or, as T. W. Adorno has observed of popular
music, "The composition hears for the listener." Thus Liberace
is a much more "musical" pianist than Serkin, whose piano is
not adorned with antique candelabra and whose stance at it is
as businesslike as Liberace's is "artistic." So, too, our Collegiate
Gothic, which may be seen in its most resolutely picturesque
(and expensive) phase at Yale, is more relentlessly Gothic than
Chartres, whose builders didn't even know they
were
Gothic and
so missed many chances for quaint effects.s And so, too, Boca
Raton, the millionaires' suburb that Addison Mizener designed
in Palm Beach during the Great Bull Market of the 'twenties, is
so aggressively Spanish Mission that a former American ambas–
sador to Spain is said to have murmured in awe, "It's
more Spanish than anything I ever saw in Madrid." The same
Law of the Built-In-Reaction also insures that a smoothly air–
brushed pin-up girl by Petty is more "sexy" than a real naked
woman, the emphasis of breasts .and thighs corresponding to the
pornographically exaggerated Gothic details of Harkness. More
sexy
but not more
sexual,
the relation between the terms being
similar to that of
sentimentality
to
sentiment
or
modernistic
to
modern,
or
art
to
arty.
The production of Masscult is a subtler business than one
might think. We have already seen in the case of Poe that a
serious writer will produce art even when he is trying to function
8 When I lived in Harkness Memorial Quadrangle some thirty years
ago, I noticed a number of cracks in the tiny-paned windows of my room
that had been patched with picturesquely wavy strips of lead. Since the
place had just been built, I thought this peculiar. Later I found that after
the windows had been installed, a special gang of artisans had visited them;
one craftsman had delicately cracked every tenth or twentieth pane with
a little hammer and another had then repaired the cracks. In a few days,
the windows of Harkness had gone through an evolution that in backward
places like Oxford had taken centuries. I wonder what they do in Harkness
when a window is broken by accident.
