roll over beethoven, there s a new way to be cool

feature article richard a. peterson roll over beethoven, there s a new way to be cool For generations, preference for high and disdain for popular culture was a means the elite used to distinguish themselves from the masses. In sharp contrast, the display of high status today relies on familiarity with the full range of cultural fare. This change in evaluation of status poses a challenge for the future of the fine arts. At a recent classical music concert, I overheard a welldressed matron comment: It is a pity that men don t wear tuxedos any more. Pitiable or not, it is true that few American men wear formal attire these days. Tuxedo wearing is now restricted to men in wedding parties, those attending high school proms and waiters at ritzy restaurants. The passing of the tux as the obligatory public armor of high status signals more than a style change. Statistics demonstrate a systematic change in the way people display high status, a change from the selective highbrow snob to the cosmopolitan omnivore. In the old days, a highbrow showed his or her status by embracing the elevated and rejecting the common Rothko not Rockwell, Beethoven not The Beatles. Today, the true connoisseur enjoys it all: National Public Radio, Public Enemy, Britney Spears, Ingmar Bergman, Spike Lee and Lucinda Williams. Valuing so many aesthetics erodes patronage of the fine arts and will profoundly affect their future. the upscaling of shakespeare In his study of how cultural distinctions arose in America, historian Lawrence Levine notes that in the first half of the 19th century the works of Shakespeare were part of popular culture, widely known by all sectors of society. In the second half of the century, those trying to draw a clear line between the fine arts and popular culture elevated the Bard to being the icon of civilization. Only people with refined cultural experience, the fine arts entrepreneurs argued, could truly understand Shakespeare and his ilk. Only those with a large cranial capacity as signaled by a high brow had the ability to fully understand the fine arts. These cultural elites and the art they espoused came to be called highbrow, as contrasted with the popular or lowbrow culture of the masses. Levine shows that cultivating the fine arts was not sufficient to ensure highbrow status. Aspirants to high status had not only to patronize the sublime but also to avoid the base. As Harpers magazine said in 1883, certain art works are Not only tests of taste but even of character. If a man gives himself to Shakespeare and Chaucer, we have a clue to the man. [Likewise] the man who among all operas prefers [the inferior Italian] Don Giovanni or the Barber of Seville... involuntarily reveals himself as he makes his preferences known. The caste-like nature of the system was not lost on commentators at the time. They regularly called Boston s cultural elite Brahmans. Paul DiMaggio provides a concrete example of how elites fashioned the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow in his study of the founding of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Until the 1870s, orchestra concerts were a mix of classical music, sentimental songs, theatrical numbers and martial music. Then a small group of the Boston elite set out to purge orchestral performances of all but fine art music. They invested in concert halls, created and subsidized the orchestra, imported a conductor and key players from Germany and saw to it that newspaper reviews stressed the differences between highbrow fine art and lowbrow popular culture. A parallel process took place in the formation of the Museum of Fine Arts. Its founders channeled money to Harvard University, using the resources of one bastion of highbrow culture to promote the creation of another. Indeed, the proliferation of American liberal arts colleges in this period can be seen, in part, as a device to sharpen highbrow discrimination in the rising generation of the privileged class. At the same time, other signs of status became available to an ever-widening public. An exaggerated focus on proper etiquette and the correct placement and use of dinnerware and other status props led, as historian Arthur Schlesinger notes, to the proliferation of books and courses on etiquette in the final decades of the 19th century. These learning tools made it easier for anyone with a bit of money to acquire the external signs of refinement, leading, as Levine shows, to an ever-greater reliance on the fine arts as the litmus test of highbrow status. The advantage of arts appreciation as a status marker lay in the fact that it took years to cultivate the eye and ear to be able to distinguish the true gems of literature, painting and concert halls from inferior works. As important, arts events became a prime pretext for social gatherings of the elect, and generous patronage of the arts was the hallmark of the stalwart defender of all that was best of civilization. In such a context, a rendering of a work by Shakespeare was the revelation of a sacred mystery. 34 contexts summer 2002

Print and frame shop selling fine art reproductions, posters of celebrities, labels from fruit crates, illustrations from children s books, maps and much more. debasing the coin In the first third of the 20th century, a brow level between high and low, the middlebrow, was identified. Essayist Margaret Widdemer, writing in a 1933 issue of the Saturday Review of Literature, identified middlebrow culture as mechanically aping highbrow tastes. Current judgments of taste were being read, she said, directly from the pages of newspaper and magazine reviews. At the same time such symbols of Western civilization could be purchased as The Complete Works of..., reproductions or superficial knock-offs of the original thing. Busts of Shakespeare and copies of the Mona Lisa became widely available. The RCA-Victor record company offered recorded Treasures of Opera and a multidisk Introduction to Good Music on its high-priced Red Seal imprint, and RCA s newly formed radio network offered excerpts from the masters played by its NBC studio orchestra. Widdemer was shocked at this debasement of the high-art symbols of distinction. By mid-century distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow were widely used in public discourse, and in 1949 Life, the ubiquitous middle-class magazine of the time, ran an article with a series of pictures on how to distinguish each of the three types of culture. The brow levels were identified by their distinctive tastes in consumption, with listings of representative clothes, food, perfume, drink, cars, television programs and other consumer items. Such tip sheets proliferated, but essayist Russell Lynes cautioned that the status value of any specific symbol of taste cheapened over time. For example, he pointed out that Whistler s Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1 had been highbrow in the era 1870-90. By 1910-20 it had become middlebrow and was called Portrait of the Artist s Mother. By 1940-50 the same painting, called Whistler s Mother, was considered lowbrow. Lynes recognized an inverse process as well. For example, he noted that The Crossroads of Life, a D.W. Griffiths film that was lowbrow in the teens, had been revalorized as highbrow by the 1940s. summer 2002 contexts 35

Mass culture critics of the 1950s decried what they saw as the eroding effects of commercially disseminated popular culture. As Herbert Gans shows in his book Popular Culture and High Culture, they were galvanized by the fear that bad culture drives out the good, resulting in what essayist and poet T. S. Eliot called a wasteland. David Riesman took issue with this argument. Presciently, in 1950 he argued in The Lonely Crowd that standards were not being debased; rather, a new way of evaluating status was replacing the old. The older way, identified as inner direction, stood on a set of generalized standards of value and behavior inculcated early in life that acted like a gyroscope, so that the inner-directed person went In the old days, a highbrow showed his or her status by embracing the elevated and rejecting the common Rothko not Rockwell, Beethoven not The Beatles. Today, the true connoisseur enjoys it all: National Public Radio, Public Enemy, Britney Spears, Ingmar Bergman, Spike Lee and Lucinda Williams. Valuing so many aesthetics erodes patronage of the fine arts and will profoundly affect their future. through life on the straight and narrow path. Riesman identified the then-emerging new pattern as other direction. Rather than being driven by guilt, the other-directed person feels anxiety at the prospect of getting out of step with his fellows. In Riesman s view this person develops a radar that continually scans the social environment to find his or her other-directed way. Riesman became widely known for this work his likeness appeared on the cover of Time magazine but the work was resolutely ignored by his fellow sociologists. As Gans notes, while some debated whether mass culture had triumphed, most sociologists studied social class apart from culture and were blind to the changing standards of taste. Unfortunately the 1950s saw no large-scale surveys of cultural taste, but early in the next decade French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu conducted the first such survey. He found a pattern showing highbrow exclusiveness appreciating the fine and disdaining the coarse in the professional class, a less clear pattern of choices among those in business, and lowbrow tastes among the working class. More recently, Michèle Lamont has shown that upper middle class Parisians still use highbrow standards of taste in evaluating others, but people of the same class in a French industrial city, as well as Americans in New York and Indianapolis, are much less concerned about taste. the markers of status are a changin Highbrow terminology is archaic, formal attire is seldom worn, and the word suit is used as a term of derision even among those who regularly wear suits. Virtually every college graduate (95 percent) polled for the General Social Survey of 1993 agreed with the assertion that excellence is just as likely to be found in folk culture or popular culture as in traditional high culture. With a group of associates, I have studied the meaning of these findings that seem so inconsistent with the expectations of earlier times. We use the General Social Survey as well as the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which has been collected periodically since 1982 by the Census Bureau for the National Endowment for the Arts. First using just the 1982 survey, we found that while those from the most high-status occupations (professionals and executives) are by far the most likely to attend classical music concerts, opera, ballet and theater and to visit art museums, they do not restrict themselves solely to such highbrow pursuits. Of all the occupational groups, they were also the most likely to take part in a wide range of more plebeian pursuits, from attending sports events to gardening. What is more, they say they are interested in many types of popular music ranging (in 1982) from blues to rock, only drawing the line at country music. Thus highbrow exclusion is giving way to an enthusiastic embrace of most, if not all, cultural forms. It remains true that well-educated people with high-status occupations are the most likely to take part in fine arts activities of all sorts, but these same people are also more likely than others to engage in a broad range of popular-culture activities. Since they accept such diverse fine art and pop cultural pursuits, we call these new cosmopolitans omnivores. Using both 1982 and 1992 data, we show the growth of omnivorousness over time. Americans born since World War II are more likely to be omnivorous than their elders, and each generation has become more omnivorous over time. The evidence suggests that omnivorous taste does not mean that the omnivore consumes everything indiscriminately. Rather, it means being open to appreciating everything. While hostile to snobbishness, omnivorousness does not imply an indiffer- 36 contexts summer 2002

ence to distinctions; its emergence suggests new rules about what makes for good or bad taste. The criteria of distinction, of which omnivorousness is an expression, center not on what one consumes but on the way the items are understood. For the omnivore, expressions of all sorts are appreciated in terms of their own aesthetic. In the case of music, over the years cultural experts have rethought successive low forms of music, such as jazz, country, blues, bluegrass and rock. Expressions first generally viewed as nonmusical and morally corrupting each became a music to be appreciated on its own aesthetic terms. Ken Burns s ten-hour PBS series Jazz, for example, shows how a music of lowly origins was reconceived as art. Purged of its derogatory rap label, hip-hop music is currently in the early stages of such conversion, as scholarly evaluations are published and courses on hip-hop enter the college curriculum. beethoven has been rolled The full ramifications of the shift from highbrow snob to cosmopolitan omnivore in the second half of the 20th century have yet to be fully explored. Nonetheless, the effect of this change on arts participation is all too clear to managers in the fine arts sector. Public arts participation had expanded rapidly over the third quarter of the 20th century as numerous new orchestras, dance companies, theaters and arts museums were formed and old ones expanded their offerings. What is more, the arts seemed slated for even more rapid expansion in the final quarter of the century as the exceptionally large group of people born following World War II reached adulthood. Not only were these baby boomers numerous, but many had the profile of arts appreciators. They were collegeeducated, urban and, for their age, both affluent and unencumbered by young children in the home. The arts boom did not continue. National levels of fine arts participation rose only gradually after 1980, and even this masks another, more fundamental change. The arts audience is aging significantly more rapidly than the general population. Shown in the study we conducted for the National Endowment for the Arts, the average age of people attending ballet and art museums increased seven years between 1982 and 1997, while audiences for theater and classical music Photo by Adrian Graham Household CD storage rack with eclectic range of music. summer 2002 contexts 37

aged five and six years respectively. Only the audience for opera aged more slowly than Americans generally, but opera lovers were the oldest in the first place. The reason for this aging is not hard to find. Relatively fewer high-status middleclass baby boomers follow their elders as patrons of the arts. At the same time, they are much more likely to attend various low-status activities and appreciate more diverse kinds of music than those of lower-class standing. The latter are more likely to take part in a narrow range of activities associated with their ethnicity, occupation and locality. We call such lowstatus people univores. Some univores are devoted to ethnic music, rap, religious music, or heavy metal while shunning the other forms, a pattern that contrasts with the typically more affluent omnivores, who are more likely to be somewhat knowledgeable about most, if not all, these different styles of music and their associated subcultures. The shift to omnivorousness helps explain the aging of the arts audience: The fine arts have lost their special importance in status display. In the era of the highbrow, participation in and donations to the fine arts were essential to status. Now, the fine arts are only one of many sorts of cultural activity that compete for time, energy and money in the quest for status. In a recent nod to omnivorous tastes, the British Council, which is the government agency responsible for publicizing the best of Great Britain among people around the world, has changed its representation of what is best about Britain. For generations Shakespeare and the other notable writers and scientists alone were used to illustrate Britain s excellence, but in 2000, the council changed its publicity thrust. It now portrays England as the cradle of the game the world knows as football and the home of some of that sport s great current players. Promotional displays feature young, handsome David Beckham, soccer celebrity and husband of Victoria Posh Spice Adams, member of the internationally famous Spice Girls. Of course, Shakespeare isn t dead yet. In this omnivorous era of mix and match, Will has returned as an all-too-human bumbling young playwright in the film Shakespeare in Love. Mozart has also been given humanizing treatment in another Posters at retail store catering to diverse musical tastes. Above poster features recording by a mountain fiddler, classical music cellist and jazz bassist. 38 contexts summer 2002

hit film, Amadeus. It is only a matter of time before a film portrays Ludwig von Beethoven as the Chuck Berry of his day. Arts promoters are finding a variety of ways to enrich the arts by forging closer ties with popular culture. Moving beyond the realm of culture, there is mounting evidence that omnivores are more socially tolerant, environmentally concerned and committed to democratic ideals than their highbrow counterparts. Just as there was an affinity between 19th century entrepreneurial capitalism and the highbrow, there seems to be an affinity between omnivorousness and the needs of the world-traveling corporate elite. n recommended resources Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984 [1979]. Bourdieu explores the ways French taste differs by class; this study has spawned a generation of research. Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Updated from a 1970s essay, this edition identifies a range of taste cultures. Lamont, Michele. Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Lamont asked Frenchmen and Americans how they choose the people with whom they want to associate. Parisians stress manners, New Yorkers money, and the Americans generally stress morals. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Levine examines the 19th-century creation of the highbrow idea showing, for example, how the popular Shakespeare became difficult. Peterson, Richard A., Pamela C. Hull, and Roger Kern. Age and Arts Participation: 1982-1997. National Endowment for the Arts, Research Monograph 34. Santa Ana, Calif.: Seven Locks Press, 2000. Shows that American audiences for the fine arts are rapidly aging. Peterson, Richard A., and Roger Kern. Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore. American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 900-07. Documents the omnivore-univore pattern and suggests an explanation. Peterson, Richard A., and Albert Simkus. How Musical Taste Groups Mark Occupational Status Groups. in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, ed. Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Omnivorousness as a style of status signaling is introduced here. Partial calendar of events for a fine arts series with diverse programming. summer 2002 contexts 39