[thundergolfer]

The ‘brow’ standards have dropped significantly, in a process Fussell has described as the general proletarianization of culture.

For a long time films that would be considered niche and arthouse were middlebrow, because film itself was at best a middlebrow medium.

To people still concerned with the various brows, Marvel films are below low. They are sign of a debased and infantile film culture that caters to childish tastes and merchandising, not art.

[mordechai9000]

Years ago I was surprised to read a critic that described Branagh's Hamlet as middlebrow. I mean, Henry V, sure - that only even qualifies as middlebrow because it's Shakespeare. I would assume it was lowbrow at the time it was written. I love the prologue, though.

[thundergolfer]

Yeah I'd say the critic was most likely affirming the idea that film is a middlebrow medium. Seeing Hamlet at the Globe is high brow, but seeing Hamlet as the cinema is middlebrow.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The Globe is full of tourists, so it's multibrow at best.

Bourdieu's take was that the working classes like simple sentimental art, the middle classes like aspirational, middlebrow art because they feel they have something to prove, and the upper classes often prefer kitsch.

Although sometimes it's high status middlebrow kitsch, such as a lot of opera and light classical music, which is more sentimental than technical.

Most opera lovers have no idea who Luigi Nono was, and would care less if they did know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joteZTLpHdE

Highbrow art is the exclusive niche domain of intellectuals and academics UNLESS it's been commodified into a Veblen good, like contemporary art.

[jancsika]

> Although sometimes it's high status middlebrow kitsch, such as a lot of opera and light classical music, which is more sentimental than technical.

Are you sure it's more sentimental than technical? Like, with-your-ears sure?

Note that it took something like 140 years for someone to write a tempo fugue using a piano technique in Chopin's 4th Ballade. That is to say-- sentimental composers are as good at hiding their technique as audiences are at missing it.