MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
629
public the writer or artist or composer or philosopher or critic
or architect should consider must be that of
his
peers. The
informed, interested minority-what Stendhal called "We
Happy Few." Let the majority eavesdrop if they like, but their
tastes should be firmly ignored.
There
is
a compromise between the conservative and
liberal proposals which I think is worth considering-neither an
attempt to recreate the old avant-garde nor one to raise the
general level of Masscult and Midcult. It
is
based on the recent
discovery-since 1945-that there is not One Big Audience
but rather a number of smaller, more specialized audiences that
may still be commercially profitable; or
if
this
is
too ambitious
a term, viable. (I take it for granted that the larger-and hence
the less differentiated-the audience, the less chance there
is
of something original and lively creeping in, since the principle
of the lowest common denominator applies.) This discovery has
in
fact resulted in the sale of "quality" paperbacks and record–
ings and the growth of "art" cinema houses, off-Broadway
theaters, concert orchestras and
art
museums and galleries. The
mass audience
is
divisible, we have discovered-and the more
it
is
divided, the better. Even television, the most senseless and
routinized expression of Masscult (except for the movie news–
reels), might be improved by this approach. One possibility
is
pay-lV, whose modest concept is that only those who subscribe
could get the program, like a magazine; but,
also
like a maga·
zine, the editors would decide what goes
in,
not the advertisers;
a small gain but a real one. The networks oppose this on phil–
anthropic grounds--they don't see why the customer should pay
fcir what he now gets free. But perhaps one would rather pay
for bread than get stones for nothing.
As
long as our society is "open" in Karl Popper's
sense-–
that is unless or until it is closed by a mass revolution stimulated
by the illusion of some "total solution" such as
Ru~ian-type
Communism or Hitler-type Fascism, the name doesn't really
matter-there will always be happy accidents because of the
