THE
MADISON AVENUE VILLAIN
589
proceed to lose our natural antipathy to this kind of collaboratiotl
through frustration, ambition, or financial want,
hemultipli~s
among us every day. In substantiation, I should like to conclude
this
essay by distinguishing two broad types of intellectual middk,:,
men in order to show how the Wall Street villain is presently
threatening to implicate us all.
The first type is, paradoxically, often one of the most
vigorous critics of Madison Avenue, apparently unaware that
he is himself an Intellectual in a Grey Flannel Suit. By taste or
design, he is invariably a middlebrow, described by Hannah
Arendt as "often well read and well informed, whose sole func–
tion is to change cultural objects to make them palatable to
those who want to be entertained-and this is worse--to be
'educated,' that is, to acquire as cheaply as possible some kind of
cultural knowledge to improve social status." This intellectual
is
quite often a network hack. But, quite often, he is a well
known personality, hired by the media to lend some authority to
their vulgarization of high culture: a college president, a univer–
sity lecturer, a symphony conductor, a novelist, a poet, a psychol–
ogist, a theologian, a
TV
journalist, a cultural critic. His activi–
ties are many and varied, but whether he moderates panel dis–
cussions, teaches TV cram courses, dispenses superficial psycho–
logical advice, popularizes Shakespeare, bowdlerizes dramatic
and literary classics, simplifies the problems of music, or formu–
lates quiz questions, his function remains the same: to convert
the objects of the intellect into commodities which can be sold
across the counter like a bar of soap.
The justification with which this artist or intellectual tries
to distinguish his media activities from those of a commercial
salesman is familiar to us all-it has to do with "raising the
level of popular taste." This oft-repeated formula stubbornly
maintains its popularity, despite the obvious and continuing de–
cline in popular taste, precisely because it permits the middle–
brow to flourish
in
a commodity system while still proclaiming
