in a post about reissues and Yoshihiro Tatsumi Bill politely accused me of wanting to fetishize comics as trash. I volleyed back that, hey, I like Fort Thunder, and then I added this:
I have more problems with middle-brow…stuff that makes a pretense of being important but doesn’t actually have anything to say, and doesn’t make any effort to say it in an original way.that’s kind of problematical definition of highbrow vs. middlebrow, essentially calling highbrow what you like & middlebrow what you don’t like.
Bill seemed satisfied, but then Miriam called me out on the carpet:
that’s kind of problematical definition of highbrow vs. middlebrow, essentially calling highbrow what you like & middlebrow what you don’t like.
i’m sure adrian tomine would say he has something to say & makes an effort to say it in an original way (in “sleepwalk,” none of the stories has an ending, until the last one! that’s a unique approach in comics, albeit a stupid one).
“fun home” engages with ulysses, etc., & as i recall you didn’t like it. does that make it middlebrow because it failed, by your definition?
also, the earlier schrag high school chronicles weren’t terribly literary (in the sense of explicitly engaging with the literary canon). would you define them as highbrow, & if so, why?
So, okay, I will try to defend myself, more or less.
I haven’t read anything by Adrian Tomine, honestly, and I’ve barely looked at his art. To the extent I’ve seen anything by him, it didn’t make me want to look at anything else, but I can’t classify him as highbrow or lowbrow or even cueball bald without reading more (or anything) that he’s written.
Fun Home more or less defines middle-brow, I think, at least for me. I found it really boring and predictable — earnest anecdote, earnest anecdote, moment of clarity, moment of ambivalent trasncendence, earnest anecdote…I felt like she might as well have just cut and pasted the thing from random scenes from This American Life. Yeah, there were literary references, but every time she dropped one I heard the thud. And her art does nothing for me.
Schrag’s first book, Awkward, I think probably actually qualifies as low-brow in some sense; it’s a high-school journal in a lot of ways. She kind of keeps that all the way through too; in Likewise she sort of reinterprets Ulysses as a girlie journal. The way she maneuvers around high-art, low-art distinctions is one of the things I like about her, actually. I think it’s also part of the reason she doesn’t receive as much critical enthusiasm as she should — folks don’t quite know what to make of her.
As for Miriam’s broader point — she’s certainly right that I’m pretty much using middle-brow to mean “things that are pretentious but stupid” as opposed to things that are pretentious but manage to deliver (high-brow) and things that don’t have a ton of pretensions (low-brow.) There are a lot of problems with that definition obviously — for one thing, low-brow work often has pretentions to its lowbrowness — that’s the case, for example, with a lot of country music. And drawing a line between high-brow and middle-brow can be tricky. I guess one way to think about it is relationship to the avant garde, or to high-art modes. Fort Thunder is thinking about visual gallery art, which is definitely high-brow; Fun Home is thinking about memoir, which I think is middle-brow.
Just being high-brow doesn’t mean it’s good, of course…there’s lots of bad visual art, and it’s all still high-brow, not middle-brow. I think free jazz is generally pretty boring, but it’s boring high-art, not boring middle-brow art. The question, though, is whether I can think of any middle-brow art I think is good. I was going to float Marston’s Wonder Woman, but on second thought that’s really pretty clearly low-brow… I like Simon and Garfunkel, who I think are pretty solidly middle-brow; they have pretensions, they’re not necessarily all that smart, but it’s redeemed by formal elements like the songwriting and the harmonies (and I do find their twee lameness kind of appealing, I have to admit.) I like Joni Mitchell. I”m not doing well with the comics though…I think Y:The Last Man would qualify — it’s got major pretensions wrapped in a very accessible genre package. And I sort of liked it…though not enough to really say it breaks the mold. I don’t know…anyone want to float a better segmentation of high/middle/low brow than I’ve managed to come up with? Or tell me something that’s middle-brow that I should like?
i was actually thinking of previous times we’d discussed brow height on hu, from seuss vs. sendak to fan investment in literary/comics characters.
i come at this as a self-identified purveyor (& enjoyer, although not exclusively) of middlebrow art. i want to write & draw well, but i'm more concerned with being entertaining than revolutionizing comics, if i have to choose.
See, but I see wanting to entertain as pretty much a low-brow ambition. Wanting to be meaningful and profound would be middle-brow; wanting to revolutionize comics would be high-brow…maybe.
I don’t think Bechdel would argue that her main goal was to entertain..whereas Johnny Ryan probably would say that was his goal, more or less.
From the examples you’ve given, middle-brow seems like a compromise between the practical need to entertain ($$$) and the personal need to be relevant. Countless films, pop songs, and even a few TV series could be described as middle-brow. High-brow works in these media are rare because they’re built around mass markets, and film/TV are especially expensive art forms (I think the hard part is distinguishing between the smarter low-brow entertainment and middle-brow works).
High-brow isn’t necessarily throwing money down the drain, but the profit motive seems much less significant. That’s why high-brow works tend to be concentrated in media that are much less costly to produce, like the fine arts. For example, there’s a lot of money spent on paintings and sculptures, but no one becomes an artist with the expectation of getting rich, or winning the hearts of millions of couch potatoes. Instead, every artist wants to be the guy/gal who revolutionizes the art world.
Hey Richard. That makes sense. I think Bob Dylan and must be middle-brow…and I do like Dylan okay, and many of his avatars (Richard Thompson, for example) a lot. I think Dr. Seuss is fairly middle-brow too…though obviously he wanted to entertain, which maybe contradicts my definition above….
Could middlebrow perhaps be thought of as a conventionalized highbrow–“highbrow as genre” you might say? When someone takes a stab at being highbrow by following certain thematic or visual tropes, but without any of the originality or understanding that animated those tropes in the first place, would you call that failed highbrow or middlebrow?
Incidentally, Noah, I have a friend in SCAD’s Sequential Art grad program, and I try to talk comics with him sometimes. He’s usually not interested in anything I mention, but when I asked him about Jeffrey Brown (that page you posted with the Chris Ware cameo reminded me of stuff I’ve seen him draw before), he practically jumped up and shouted that he LOVES Jeffrey Brown. So I guess there really are fans who want to read about how wonderful and awesome Jeffrey Brown is.
Hey Curt. It would depend, but I think I might well call it failed high-brow. Memoir isn’t really a high-brow genre, for example…it’s just middle-brow, not failed high-brow. Same with folk music of the Judy Collins/Bog Dylan vein; they’re not failing at a high-brow genre they’re succeeding at a middle-brow one.
Or so I’m saying at the moment. I’m sort of conceding Miriam’s point and trying to find a way to get middle-brow to not automatically just mean “stuff I don’t like.”
Oh, and I know people love Jeff Brown…it just baffles me.
I’ve found that it’s more useful to try to use “middlebrow” in a purely descriptive sense and not as a pejorative (although that’s definitely swimming against the current). I think there are a lot of great middlebrow works of art – that is, works in a “popular” genre that have more serious (and more conscious) ambitions: Peanuts, Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics, Frank Capra movies, many John Ford movies, Raymond Chandler novels, Chaplin’s features, late Beatles’ albums, Tintin in Tibet, a lot of Bob Dylan’s music, a lot of Duke Ellington’s stuff.
It’s become somewhat standard to praise Duke Ellington’s early stuff at the expense of his later suites – or to damn Chaplin’s features with faint praise – but I think that’s an example of essentially high-brow (and/or low-brow)-loving critics trying to defend their turf.
Peanuts is probably the definitive comics example; good call.
Duke Ellington’s early stuff is hard to beat…but I do like the late work as well.
I would define middlebrow as a work that is intended to be accessible without too much effort for the viewer, but still have some artistic and/or thematic depth. Best Picture nominees at the Oscars are always middlebrow, for example.
Your suggestion that fine art is high-brow by definition (the good and the bad alike) is wrong. There are galleries – even whole streets – in LA devoted to low-brow art. The Fort Thunder kids are the very types who would likely fill some of those galleries some day, just as some of the illustrators from Blab have been doing for years. I wouldn’t conflate visual formalism with high-brow either. There may be a lot of room for formalist experimentation in comics, but in the end it’s just flogging the neighbor’s thoroughly dead horse.
Post morning commute, I regret the dick-ish tone implied by my first sentence above. It should have read something like, “I’m having difficulty with your suggestion…”
This brow height thing is just a vague and slightly smarmy shorthand for what could be a more precise opinion about something. I agree that the implied categories themselves do not connote quality or value, but those particular terms are pretty pejorative. They sound silly, and even self-mocking; allowing a critic or reviewer to give a wink and imply something difficult to defend. They’re throwaway terms. That’s probably why we aren’t sure what precisely they should mean in this context – because they are most useful as subjunctives.
I don’t know…any categorization is going to be a shorthand. I think it’s a somewhat useful categorization, in that it applies across genres and mediums, and does I think point to actual commonalities in terms of goals, audience, and reception.
But, in any case, your comment didn’t seem particularly dickish. Not to worry.
Chris, you’re the first person ever mellowed by a morning commute. Bravo!
I think the most interesting thing about these “brow” labels is that they often reveal more about the critic than the actual work itself.
Noah, I get the impression you are trying to use these terms to distinguish between works created by hacks, journeymen, and avant-garde artists.
Like or dislike aside, how would you classify Alan Moore’s Promethea or Grant Morrison’s last issue of Animal Man?
Coming late, I’d question the characterization of fine art generally. Fort Thunder’s long been in galleries (as Forcefield at the Whitney Biennale in ’02, the Wunderground show, Brinkman at M+B in LA. And plenty of young & old artists are careerist– some of my exhibiting friends have griped about shows drying up after they're not the next big thing. I've come to doubt any correlation between monetary & artistic success.
I tend to think of things as populist or not– fine art never is, Buster Keaton always ways. And that has no bearing on whether its profound (here, the former's often not, the latter mostly was). Unfortunately for critics, lots of populist works don't give us much to do.
(Aside: Noah, about seven or eight years ago I saw Richard Thompson live. AMAZING show, trance induction from music not drugs, and I was one of two people under 40 there, which makes him highbrow? Who knows.)
I don’t know that hacks, journeyman, avante garde quite works; hackwork is too pejorative for lowbrow, I think.
I think Moore and Morrison would in general be middle-brow, yeah.
Keaton always “was” and I can spells.
I said I think Thompson’s middle-brow; pretentious, but for the gallery. He is amazing, though, especially the early stuff (speaking of pretentions.) I envy you’re getting to see him.
“hackwork is too pejorative for lowbrow”
I find that a little funny, given the origins of the word lowbrow, but I think I see what you’re saying. Hackwork is lowbrow or no-brow, but lowbrow isn’t necessarily hackwork.
Here’s a few more names for you to ponder: Stan Lee, Bob Haney, Windsor McCay, and Johnny Monomyth.
Johnny Monomyth is incomprehensible bricolage that three people read. That’s highbrow.
Bob Haney is mass audience pulp. So’s Stan Lee, really; I think they’re both lowbrow. Winsor McCay is too, I think. George Herriman would be harder to call; I think he’s probably middle.
I think they are useful terms (which I why I want to rehabilitate “middlebrow”).
And even if they’re just being used for “turf wars”, sometimes those kinds of fights are necessary. Like: one of my favorite works of criticism is Dave Marsh’s The Heart of Rock and Soul, which is very much about kicking around middlebrow, Dylan-esque artsy rock.
I’m surprised by Windsor McCay as lowbrow. I thought he was the Citizen Kane of cartooning: Considered mildly popular and entertaining when the work was first printed, he wasn’t really appreciated as a pioneer until after the fact. Noah, wrt low vs middle, I’m wondering if you think he just didn’t have much to say?
As an aside, this conversation just became useful to me in trying to explain my feelings on the new Star Trek movie: the old Star Trek was frequently middlebrow while JJ Abrams version is entirely lowbrow. Like them both, but prefer the former.
Winsor McCay is an interesting case. He’s definitely working for a popular audience and has no pretentions to making big statements or anything like that. But he was technically and formally ambitious: pushing the boundaries of sequential storytelling on the comics page and pioneering animation as entertainment.
I think maybe things also change too, since it’s in part a reception thing. McCay was surely lowbrow when he started, but is definitely middle, or even highbrow now. Rockabilly was lowbrow in its initial audience, but it’s now retro-chic in a way which makes it middle-brow.
Old Star Trek is a great example of middle-brow.
Out of curiosity, how would you classify Watchmen (the book, not the hideous movie)?
I think it’s middle-brow.
I think Stan Lee may be too, on second thought.
“Chris, you’re the first person ever mellowed by a morning commute.”
You just have to wear yourself out on a bicycle, and without being hit or nearly hit by any cars.
Noah, what's your opinion of Journalista's terms, "Literary" & "Pop" – and its separate manga category?
I think it’s problematic to try to do this by genre. Noah says memoir is not a highbrow genre…but it can be. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is an obvious example…Also Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Definitely high-brow practitioners in that genre. Just like there are high brow comics artists–like the mysterious team behind Johnny Monomyth…etc.
Eric, I don’t actually think Speak Memory is highbrow, though obviously much of the rest of Nabokov’s oeuvre is. I haven’t read Roland Barthes so I can’t speak to that.
Genre is a lot about audience and reception. I think it makes sense to describe genres in terms of lowbrow, highbrow, etc., at least in general.
I don’t think there was any doubt that there are high-brow comics practitioners…but comics is a medium, not a genre, as I think you’ve pointed out.
Chris, I think the literary/pop/manga distinction makes sense. Those are basically genre distinctions as Dirk uses them, I think. I don’t think they map exactly onto highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow, etc., but they’re not supposed to, really.
speak memory seems pretty highbrow to me, why would the reason be not to classify it that way if you would call, say, pale fire highbrow?
i think jay-z (blueprint and onward, at least) is a pretty good example of middlebrow, and i say this as a pretty big fan, although i mostly like his earlier lowbrow stuff better
Well, Pale Fire is a lot more formally complicated than Speak Memory. Admittedly I haven’t read either in a long time, but I remember Speak Memory as being about the easiest, most straightforward Nabokov I read.
What about Outkast, do you think? Their last album at least verged on middle-brow…(and I adored their last album.)
“speak memory seems pretty highbrow to me, why would the reason be not to classify it that way”
Speak, Memory is a pretty straightforward book and very charming. Both of those are key middlebrow traits, I would think. Nabokov kicks back and reminisces about his exotic childhood. Maybe he sneaks in some other stuff that I missed, but I say that only to hedge myself. The book can be read and enjoyed as straight entertainment, and I guess that’s mainly how people read it.
For instance, I loved the book as a kid, and I don’t go for highbrow stuff. Of course you must take this testimony for whatever you think it’s worth.
Finally, the book first appeared as a series of essays in The New Yorker, which at least had the reputation of being quintessentially middlebrow. To make a lateral move in my argument, I’ll bring in Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. The book also appeared as a series of essays in The New Yorker, and even some women’s magazines, and I remember that one of her associates at Partisan Review thought it was unfortunate for her to go slumming that way.
You say Mary McCarthy’s book is not Nabokov’s book? A good point. But it was the same venue, and again I really like Catholic Girlhood.
speak memory’s pretty complex actually. there’s a lot of the same sort of interlocking motif stuff that nabokov puts in all his novels. i wouldn’t have caught it on my own if i hadn’t read it in a class on nabokov, though, and it’s pretty easy to enjoy the book without really being clued in to that stuff, which may make it middlebrow.
i’d definitely call outkast’s last album and the andre half of the one before that middlebrow, although i can’t really stand either one with the exception of a handful of songs. their first album is pretty clearly lowbrow, with thick drawls and more or less unmediated sex and drugs talk, but their other stuff is a bit harder to place. not sure what i’d call atliens, aquemini, and stankonia. they’re pretty clearly not lowbrow, but i’m not sure if my temptation to class them as highbrow has any basis other than just how much i like the albums.
Sigh. Nobody likes Idlewild. I think it’s a work of genius though. I burble on about it at length here if you’re interested.
“it’s pretty easy to enjoy the book without really being clued in to that stuff, which may make it middlebrow.”
All right, I’ll go with that. Maybe the book has the most potential for middlebrow enjoyment of American Nabokov. The book and Pnin, anyway.
I love Pnin. Mr. Chips with an accent.
Pnin is hard to resist. Nabokov too.