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In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are.

For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms--Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow--enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America--housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy--now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between "serious" and "popular," between "high" and "low" culture came to dominate America's expressive arts.

"If there is a tragedy in this development," Levine comments, "it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period--and many have still not regained--their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit."

In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.

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Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves.

The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.

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In the decades before the Civil War, American society witnessed the emergence of a new form of print culture, as penny papers, mammoth weeklies, giftbooks, fashion magazines, and other ephemeral printed materials brought exuberance and theatricality to public culture and made the practice of reading more controversial. For a short yet pivotal period, argues Isabelle Lehuu, the world of print was turned upside down.

Unlike the printed works of the eighteenth century, produced to educate and refine, the new media aimed to entertain a widening yet diversified public of men and women. As they gained popularity among American readers, these new print forms provoked fierce reactions from cultural arbiters who considered them transgressive. No longer the manly art of intellectual pursuit, reading took on new meaning; reading for pleasure became an act with the power to silently disrupt the social order.

Neither just an epilogue to an earlier age of scarce books and genteel culture nor merely a prologue to the late nineteenth century and its mass culture and commercial literature, the antebellum era marked a significant passage in the history of books and reading in the United States, Lehuu argues..
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From the end of Reconstruction to the eve of the Great Depression, Atlanta was the New South's "Gate City." Steve Goodson's social and cultural history looks at the variety of public amusements available to Atlantans of the day, including theater, vaudeville, dime museums, movies, radio, and classical, blues, and country music. Revealed in the ways its people embraced or condemned everything from burlesque to opera is an Atlanta unsure of its identity and acutely sensitive of its image in the eyes of the nation.

While the general populace hungered for novelty and diversion, middle-class Atlantans, white and black, saw entertainment as a source of--or threat to--status and respectability. Goodson traces the roots of this tension to the city's rapid and problematic growth, its uncomfortably diverse population, and its multiplying ties to national markets. At the same time he portrays some lively individuals who shaped Atlanta's entertainment scene. Among them are impresario Laurent DeGive, tightrope walker Professor Leon, patent-medicine salesman Yellowstone Kit, country music great Fiddlin' John Carson, and blues legends Bessie Smith and Blind Willie McTell. Goodson also brings alive the atmosphere of such venues as DeGive's resplendent Grand Opera House, George Johnson's tacky Museum of Living Wonders, the pioneering Trocadero vaudeville house, and the notorious 81 Theater on Decatur Street, an avenue whose decadent promise rivaled that of Beale in Memphis and Bourbon in New Orleans. Milestone trends and events are also showcased: performances of the play Uncle Tom's Cabin and showings of the film Birth of a Nation, visits by the Metropolitan Opera Company, the debate over Sunday entertainment, the beginning of broadcasts by "The Voice of the South"--radio station WSB--and the rise of Atlanta as the earliest capital of country and blues recording.

Accepted historical views of public entertainment in America suggest that ethnicity and class would be the most pronounced forces shaping this aspect of Atlanta's popular culture. Goodson finds, however, that race and evangelical Christianity also heavily influenced the circumstances in which Atlantans went about their fun. With implications for the entire urban South, this is an engaging look at how and why its major city once grasped at sophistication and progress with one hand while pushing it away with the other..
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This digital document is an article from The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), published by Thomson Gale on February 26, 2007. The length of the article is 540 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Best picture nominee? Well, for some of us it's 'Scooby Doo'.(General News)(Not every movie watcher goes for the highbrow fare that wins the Oscars)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication:The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR) (Newspaper)
Date: February 26, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Page: c1

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
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