Middlebrow and Minimalism: The Postwar Evolution of Aesthetics and Class Distinctions
Emily Bley
Though the United States had been intermittently entangled with global conflict and domestic insecurity for nearly half of the twentieth century, arguably its greatest period of adjustment were the years following World War II. After the collapse of international governments, a fiscal depression, and an unprecedented display of wartime atrocities, the future of American society, culture, and economy seemed more uncertain than ever before—despite evidence of concrete improvement. The recovery of the economy, mass education of American citizens, and colossal military growth ushered the United States into an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity, yet Americans had been exposed to such an incredible scale of global upheaval between 1914 and 1945 that the restoration of prewar conditions seemed beyond possibility. So, if the world could not return to its previous societal and economic structures, how could it be expected to return to its previous class-dictated cultural standards? In his book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Mark McGurl claims that the breakdown of prewar American social classes corresponded with the end of the dual cultural categorization of art as either highbrow or lowbrow, which ultimately led to the development of a new aesthetic ‘middle’ space in which modernism dwelled:
"Interwar modernism had shuttled between the extremes of high and low, between the values of “aristocracy” on the one hand and “primitivism” on the other…In the social class imaginary of the postwar period, the social distance traversed by the modernist dialectic is substantially narrowed: the crucial distinction here is between an upper middle class, for whom economic security is a given and higher education is understood as a virtual birthright, and the traditional working class, which instead of individual advancement through education offers its members the benefits of belonging and communal solidarity. The version of modernism that shuttles between these class positions [during the postwar period] is unable to come to rest in either of them..." (67)
The version of modernism identified by McGurl exists within a larger stratum of middlebrow culture, in which minimalism is arguably included. The socioeconomic climate had changed in the United States, and the demands of the growing middle class called for more palatable and digestible art forms that challenged the old highbrow and lowbrow classifications. These were the socioeconomic conditions that precipitated the rising popularity of minimalism.
This essay will attempt to analyze how the ascent of minimalism converged with socioeconomic changes in midcentury America. As the middle class widened in the United States, the appeal of middlebrow culture grew accordingly, all the while marginalizing the old aesthetic division of art as highbrow or lowbrow. A.O. Scott describes the duality of highbrow and lowbrow culture in his New York Times essay, “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow” as such: “A world of landlords and peasants, of masters and servants, of patrons and workers is one in which art and life harmonize…an intellectual feudal system, in which the lowbrows do the work and create folk arts, and the highbrows do the thinking and create fine arts.” Just as class dictated appropriate artistic guidelines in prewar society, the evolution of artistic standards and socioeconomic distinctions in postwar society also cannot be considered as separate phenomena. In the changing reality of socioeconomic classifications in midcentury America, minimalism proved to be an accessible art form for the growing middle class, though critics dismissed the form for its simplicity, degeneration, and theatricality. While none of these critiques were explicitly anti-middlebrow, almost all of the objections made against minimalism were rooted in arguments that were inherently classist. Ultimately, while minimalism is an innovative art form that should be noted for challenging conventional aesthetics during its heyday, it should also be considered as a political statement that challenged the elitist dual categorization of art as exclusively either highbrow or lowbrow in the postwar period.
Perhaps the definition of middlebrow culture can best be explained by indicating the audience to which it appealed: the new middle class that had arisen in postwar America. The growth of the middle class was a direct result of “the collapse of older social hierarchies, the decline of inherited privilege, and the rise of a new meritocratic order” (Scott, “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow”) that filled the social, economic, and cultural vacuum left in the wake of early twentieth century instability. The population boomed and industry blossomed; Americans had higher wages, more leisure time, access to higher education, and widely available music, literature, and films with incredible variation in style. These opportunities could release individuals from any particular class designation into the amorphous potentiality and mobility of the American middle; and as this class continued to grow, the content and form of the culture it consumed needed to change as well. The outdated and elitist highbrow culture was unappealing to modern Americans, as it was rooted in academia and aristocracy. The lowbrow classification was equally as unattractive; lowbrows are defined by Scott as “those who are as committed to living as highbrows are to thinking.” Middlebrow culture and its paperback literature, commercialized music, and according to some critics, minimalist artwork, was appealing in its accessibility and absorbability. This was the reality of the modern postwar period: the newly-born middle class of educated and financially stable masses fit neither in highbrow or lowbrow class distinctions, and lived in an era of growing consumerism, materialism, globalization, and immediacy.
Disillusioned with the prewar duality of highbrow and lowbrow aesthetics that was preserved by old, static, and hierarchical social classifications, the middle class embraced the middlebrow. But what exactly was so contemptible about welcoming a new cultural dimension? Critics of minimalism felt as though “something—variously called sophistication, authenticity, seriousness or just art—was being lost as the old, unbudging, quasi-feudal hierarchy of upper and lower was replaced by the hectic scrum of mass and middle” (Scott, “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow”). The frustration with middlebrow culture was that it encouraged upward mobility of lowbrows and celebrated the fallen standards of highbrows. High culture became more accessible and popular culture became more ambitious; the resulting middlebrow culture was dismissed as either pretentious or mediocre. Decades before Scott’s essay was published, Clement Greenberg called middlebrow culture in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” an “ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide” (543). Greenberg outlines the highbrow and lowbrow classes as being either cultivated or ignorant, respectively, and claims that whatever exists between those distinctions is commercialized, popularized, overtly emotional, and has no genuine cultural value (544-546). Ultimately, Greenberg’s critique of kitsch—the art form of middlebrow culture—brings to light one of the main arguments against minimalism: it offers instantaneous gratification to the audience without intellectual effort or subliminal artistic understanding. Influenced heavily by Greenberg, critic Michael Fried would famously utilize a similar classist argument later on in the twentieth century against minimalism.
Greenberg’s and Fried’s critiques mean very little without understanding how exactly minimalism fit into midcentury American social conditions. Why exactly was minimalism attractive to the middle class, and what elements of its form characterize it as middlebrow culture? According to Duncan Chesney in his article, “Beckett, Minimalism, and the Question of Postmodernism,” the increased leisure time of the growing middle class produced a need and subsequent market for modernist art, especially minimalism:
"The growth of this market, through which the very notion of art, artist, artistic production, and consumption were changed, was partially masked by the ideology of autonomy. Art was released from its courtly, ritual, and religious roles in a breakdown of the system of patronage, and thus the artist became free, his work serving only artistic ends." (638)
Minimalism responded directly to this changing reality. The form became closer to the audience, and subsequently the details surrounding the artist, their patron, and their craft became less distinguished. Minimalism was an art form that was dictated by no one, and therefore it could belong to anyone. In his essay “Specific Objects” the artist Donald Judd, considered as the reluctant founder of minimalist aesthetics, argued, “It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting” (827). Essentially, Judd suggested that the only action the spectator must take do enjoy a work of art is to feel. Minimalist art, whether it be literature, painting, sculpture, or music, is simplified to the point of being only interesting, emotive, and necessary. These were requirements fulfilled easily by both middle class artists and consumers of minimalist art in midcentury America.
Minimalism encourages audiences to engage with objective material so as to invoke some type of individualized, subjective response. There is no necessity for institution, money, or education; rather, minimalist work emphasizes the experience of the audience (whatever that may be) rather than the formal intentions of the establishment or the author. For instance, John Cage’s minimalist musical composition 4’33” has often been considered by critics of minimalism as reduction to the extreme. The piece instructs performers not to play their instruments for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds, and for that amount of time, the audience listens to silence, intermittently disrupted by incidental sounds of human life, such as coughing, laughter, or whispering. The piece is entirely experiential, temporal, and relative; it is instantly gratifying, and easy to understand regardless of class or educational differences. As Donald Judd argues in his essay, the difference between a musical composition by the likes of highbrow Mozart or Beethoven and Cage’s 4’33” is that Cage’s piece is a form that is “open and extended, more or less environmental” (826). The middle class appealed to this art form because it was encompassing across many lines of education and economic affordability; minimalism separated itself from Greenberg’s financed highbrow elites and also conceptually rose above the limitations of lowbrow culture. Beyond the musical work of Cage, minimalist writers such as Beckett could similarly appeal to an audience that levitates in the realm between highbrow and lowbrow. Because minimalism first developed around visual art, such as Donald Judd’s sculptures, the application of the form to literature has always been a bit more complex. Minimalism as language is complicated in that it is never fully objective, because every word has meaning and reference. Its stylistic requirements according to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics are as follows: “[minimalism] holds that sparseness, tautness, understatement, and reduction constitute poetic authenticity” (886). Therefore, minimalist literature is not only brief in its form, but also concise in its content.
The specific prose utilized by Samuel Beckett in his work, especially in “Imagination Dead Imagine,” aligns with both this definition and the environmental elements similar to Cage’s music. Beckett’s work is incredibly spatial and temporal in the way that it directs the reader: “No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA. Lying on the ground two white bodies, each in its semicircle” (Beckett, “Imagination Dead Imagine”). Rigorously visual and controlling of the physical environment, “Imagination Dead Imagine” has a plot and characters, yet they have both been reduced to simple frames. The characters have no characteristics that might suggest their personalities or appearances or individuality. They are no one and therefore could be anyone. Such an approach, described by John Barth in “A Few Words About Minimalism” is meant to leave the story unornamented, as Beckett seeks to “strip away the superfluous in order to reveal the necessary, the essential.” Author Duncan Chesney argues further that Beckett reduces his work to the point where it lacks any logical following at all: “Beckett had long exercised a practice of aesthetic self-denial, of conventional elements of drama and prose fiction, or rather (since such elements as character, setting, plot, and so forth cannot be entirely eradicated) of their plausibility or believability” (645). Therefore because Samuel Beckett’s work lacks explicit authorial intention, understanding his pieces has only one requirement: imagination. The artistic content of the work lies in the reader’s own interpretation of what they think Beckett was attempting to say. Ultimately, even Beckett might not even understand his own commentary; he’s more interested in directing the reader than he is in conveying his own message. Much like the music of John Cage, Beckett’s work does not require patronage or education or a determined level of class to be appreciated.
Yet to claim that both Cage and Beckett are excluded from the conceptual and fiscal preconditions of highbrow art is to arguably disregard the evolution of the minimalist form throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Is there not something elitist about understanding the artistic history, staged form, and social commentary behind both Cage’s and Beckett’s work? Undoubtedly their artistic style was innovative in the postwar period, but does that mean that it was separated completely from the highbrow? In Walter Benn Michaels’ essay, “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière and the Form of the Photograph,” Michaels points out that although the original idea behind 4’33” was to refuse to impose the composer’s intentions on the listeners, Cage’s intentional lack of artistic intention causes his work to drift into highbrow domain: “when you seek to create a work in which only the accidents matter, then not only is the recognition of your intention to do just that crucial, but also the audience’s actual experience becomes irrelevant—all that that matters is that they recognize your intention… the identity of the work consists in nothing but its ‘point’” (Michaels). It could be argued that an informed, highbrow understanding of history and aesthetics is necessary to arrive at Cage’s ‘point’ and that Beckett’s “Imagination Dead Imagine” requires a similar educational background because of his artistic direction—or lack thereof. However, the question of Beckett and Cage being potentially considered as highbrow minimalist artists ultimately lies in what specifically the ‘right’ or ‘correct’ point is to understand about this kind of minimalist work. A middle class individual might take something completely different away from a piece by Beckett or Cage than a high class individual—who is to say which of these experiences is legitimate? To claim that an interpretation by one spectator is correct while another is not, especially when the intention of the work in question is to be unintentional, is precisely the kind of classist, establishment argument that middlebrow minimalism challenges.
However, the minimalist fiction born after the era of Cage, Judd, and Beckett—specifically the work of Raymond Carver—is clearly popularized to a point in which it does not require any level of historical or formal understanding to be enjoyed. Writers such as Lydia Davis and Raymond Carver absolutely follow Judd’s, Cage’s, and Beckett’s example in simplifying their artistic message through reduction. In Carver’s piece “Neighbors” he tediously outlines the behavior of Bill and Arlene Miller in their neighbors’ empty apartment: “He finished the drink and took off the suit. He rummaged through the top drawers until he found a pair of panties and a brassiere. He stepped into the panties and fastened the brasserie” (12). Carver never explicitly comments on the peculiarity of Bill Miller wearing his neighbor’s female undergarments, but instead succinctly continues on with the story. This is because Carver does not consider his or his characters’ thoughts, opinions, or feelings as being necessary elements to include in the piece. In Robert Clark’s analysis of Carver’s career and work, “Keeping the Reader in the House” he notes that,
"The core idea that differentiates the mode [minimalism] from other movements is that prose and poetry should be extremely efficient, allusive, and implicative...The language in this type of fiction tends to be simple and direct. Narrators do not often use ornate adjectives and rarely offer effusive descriptions of scenery or extensive detail about characters' backgrounds." (106)
Clark’s analysis reinforces the minimalist belief that the interpretive significance of the artwork by the reader is more important than the artist himself. Carver’s contemporary, Lydia Davis, borrows from this seemingly mundane style in “Story,” except this time she tells the story from the first person, cutting out the artist’s presence as a narrator altogether: “I get home from work and there is a message from him: that he is not coming, that he is busy” (3). Thoughts and feelings are not conveyed—only action. Davis relies on the reader to pull emotion and subjectivity from the objectivity that she provides, and let the audience infer the rest. Like Beckett and Cage before them, to understand work written by Davis and Carver does not require a nuanced aesthetic understanding of form or history; their work is both for and about their middle class, middlebrow audiences.
Without a doubt this work can be considered as middlebrow; but why exactly is this distinction so much clearer for Carver and Davis than it was for their predecessors, Cage and Beckett? What exactly distinguishes these authors from their early minimalist peers? Minimalism under the likes of Carver is derisively dismissed as “K-mart realism…Diet-Pepsi minimalism” (Barth) precisely because of its commercial and popular appeal. In fact, according to Mark McGurl this kind of minimalism closely borders what he would consider lowbrow culture: “a domain of professional activity and camaraderie in which the desperate tackiness and dailiness of American lower-middle-class life is meant to be retained but somehow, against all odds, dignified, aestheticized” (281). This later form of minimalism stands in stark contrast to the intentionally complex and aesthetically conscious works of Cage and Beckett, in that Carver and Davis are much more concerned with connecting to their audiences by directly depicting their expected middle class readers in their middlebrow work, rather than producing art that presents larger abstract concepts on which their audiences should reflect. Carver and Davis arguably supplant their own content into ready-made aesthetic frameworks established by Cage and Beckett before them; the difference between the two lies precisely in their levels of abstraction and innovation. Carver and Davis play into the hands of an already established artistic style; for example, their work lacks authorial intention not necessarily to achieve any greater end regarding the audience’s response, but arguably because the precedent set by Beckett and Carver does not require them to have one. McGurl critiques specifically Carver’s minimalist form as such: “its literary products have no history—no history to speak of, let alone monumentalize…in the lower-middle-class world of ‘Carver Country’…[minimalism] is completely disconnected from the nexus of money and media, race and identity, personality and power (279). A summarized critique might be that Carver’s minimalism lacks depth and a durable historical connection; its aesthetic importance is limited by the primacy of a temporal audience. Can the work of Carver and Davis survive without their middleclass, middlebrow readers to identify with their stories? Arguably, this difference in duration is precisely what separates early minimalist work from its later forms. However, despite these internal differences, the work of Beckett, Cage, Carver, and Davis fall within the aesthetic middlebrow space between highbrow and lowbrow culture because of their accessibility and absorbability—though admittedly they seem to be leaning towards opposite ends within the middlebrow spectrum.
What was so contemptible about a middlebrow form that was accessible to a wider populous of people, such as the middle class? Why exactly do critics of minimalism dislike this kind of art coming out of midcentury America? In his analysis of Raymond Carver’s work, Robert Clark perhaps best outlines the primary concern held by minimalism’s toughest critics: “Minimalist stories often require readers to ‘assemble’ images and allusions in order to make a coherent, complete narrative” (107). It is precisely this kind of aesthetic agency by the spectator that is lamented by critics of minimalist art. In his essay “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried dismisses minimalism as theatrical, and considers Donald Judd’s new aesthetic form to be “the negation of art…because it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist [minimalist] work” (838). Fried’s concern with minimalist work is that its aesthetic significance does not exist without an audience. In fact, it cannot reasonably be called art without spectators precisely because it exists solely for them. What value does Cage’s music have without his audience? What do the works of Beckett, Davis, and Carver achieve without their readers to infer the details they intentionally omit? Minimalism emphasized the individualized, environmental, and temporal experience of the average person, and Fried feared that the artist’s craft, as well as the quality of highbrow art, were being lost in the new form. Fried’s view of art is that it should cause an individual to lose themselves and their awareness in a separate object; not make the viewer or reader more aware of their own presence. For this reason he believed that “art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre” (843) because by encouraging the audience’s response and not the author’s aesthetic capability, minimalism subordinates the agency of the artist and subsequently, the value of their artwork.
But how exactly are these formal artistic objections to minimalism rooted in classism? Critics of the form disliked that the audience was more involved in the aesthetic process, and furthermore, that their involvement in such a process relied less and less on a refined understanding of art, but rather more upon a deeper understanding of themselves as spectators. This is the point where Fried’s own anti-minimalist manifesto echoes Greenberg’s blatant objection to kitsch because of its emotional, commercial, and popularized middlebrow appeal. Fried was against the progress made in postwar society and the subsequent evolution of aesthetic standards that followed because they implied that the artist need not excel in their craft and the viewer need not study aesthetics, form, or history to understand form. An increase in spectatorship and a decline in specialized skill could only suggest that the quality of the art was falling in standard. The more people came to see these art forms, the farther it fell from the highbrow distinction. However, because minimalism required some basic understanding of artistic concepts, imagination, and deep feeling, the lowbrow distinction was not appropriate either. Minimalism, in the eyes of the critic, lived among the middlebrows. Anyone could experience and enjoy Cage’s music or Beckett’s plays or Davis and Carver’s writings, because there were no socioeconomic limitations that prohibited them from doing so. Essentially, Fried took issue with the accessibility of minimalist art. The more art became accessible in its theatricality, the more audiences failed “to register the enormous difference in quality between, say, the music of Carter and that of Cage or between the paintings of Louis and those of Rauschenberg…” (843). Minimalist work was popularized by an unprecedented reliance on the individual, specifically emphasizing its availability to the average man instead of the intellectual, the patron, or the aristocrat. As Clement Greenberg feared in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, minimalist artists and authors began to close the gap between the highbrow avant-garde (art considered as intellectual and aesthetically complex) and kitsch (art Greenberg believed was for the masses; commercialized and emotional) by breaking down the ‘requirements’ of understanding complex art and texts.
In the very same essay Clement Greenberg also outlines what has become an intriguing complication for minimalist art in the contemporary era. Greenberg conceptualized avant-garde art as functioning to keep ‘true’ culture alive in the face of capitalism and kitsch, though paradoxically this form “has always remained attached [to society] by an umbilical cord of gold” (Greenberg 542). Essentially, Greenberg noted that the survival of the avant-garde was dependent on the funding of art by an elite ruling class. At the time he wrote his essay, Greenberg was well aware that the rise of academicism and commercialism were indicative of the decline in power of “the rich and the cultivated” (542) but A.O. Scott fulfilled Greenberg’s worst fears when he outlined a new social hierarchy being established in contemporary times: “The highbrows were co-opted or killed off by the middle, and the elitism they championed has been replaced by another kind, the kind that measures all value, cultural and otherwise, in money.” Essentially, the class and cultural distinctions discussed in this essay are more impermanent than they appear. It could be argued that minimalism can only be considered middlebrow for a limited amount of time in American history, and that the soaring prosperity that surrounded the growth of the middle class can also be held responsible for the commercialization of culture. Modern art, especially minimalism, is becoming increasingly popularized, as well as tied to capital, as the U.S. has moved out of the postwar era into the contemporary era. Modernist art, specifically minimalist works, are appearing more frequently in galleries, universities, markets, and among the wealthy: “The art world spins in an orbit of pure money. Museums chase dollars with crude commercialism aimed at the masses and the slavish cultivation of wealthy patrons” (Scott). This begs the larger question: is minimalism, and modernism in general, becoming the new highbrow culture? According to Scott, it would not be inaccurate to say that minimalism is attached to society by an umbilical cord of gold, but Greenberg might be alarmed to know that such an attachment was motivated by popularization, and that the other end of the cord is controlled by the new societal elite: the middle class.
The growing demands of the middle-class in the postwar era called for a new art form, unlimited by elitist requirements such as education and money, and free from the institutionalized boundaries of highbrow and lowbrow culture. As Clement Greenberg noted, “a social interval has always existed in formal culture, as elsewhere in civilized society, and whose two termini converge and diverge in fixed relation to the increasing or decreasing stability of a certain society” (546). However, when the instability of this dual cultural system was exposed in the postwar era, minimalism was the art form that responded to the needs of the middle class that had blossomed from between the highbrows and lowbrows. Artists like Judd, Cage, Beckett, Davis, and Carver created reduced and simplistic works that needed only to interest their audiences—the aesthetic process was slowly turning toward the average spectator and away from the artist, their craft, and their work. Critics such as Greenberg and Fried decried and lamented the minimalist form as being degenerate, in that it encouraged commercialization and popularization by middleclass individuals, and jeopardized the integrity and quality of highbrow art. However, these arguments were rooted in prewar classist structures and systems that contrasted starkly with progressive middlebrow culture in midcentury America—and yet minimalism has arguably realigned itself with this same kind of social inequality in the modern era, only this time drawn by the capital offered by the middle class masses. Ultimately minimalism’s appeal and absorbability among middle class artists and audiences alike challenged the boundaries of aesthetic form as much as it challenged prewar socioeconomic norms.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. “Imagination Dead Imagine.” samuel-beckett.net. Web. 20 November 2015.
Cage, John. “4’33.”” Musical composition. 1952.
Carver, Raymond. “Neighbors.” Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: The Stories of Raymond Carver. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. 7-14. Print.
Chesney, Duncan McColl. “Beckett, Minimalism, and the Question of Postmodernism.”Modernism/modernity 19.4 (2012): 637-655. Web.
Clark, Robert. “Keeping the Reader in the House: American Minimalism, Literary
Impressionism, and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”.” Journal of Modern Literature 36.1 (2012): 104-118. Web.
Davis, Lydia. “The Story.” Break It Down. New York: FSG Classics, 2008. 3-6. Print.
Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 835-846. Print.
Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 539-549. Print.
Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 824-828.Print.
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2009. Print.
Michaels, Walter Benn. “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière and the Form of the Photograph.” Issue I. Nonsite.org, 25 January 2011. Web. 8 December 2015.
“Minimalism.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics and Poetry. 4th ed. 2013. 886-887. Print.
Scott, A.O. “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow.” Arts. The New York Times, 1 August 2014.Web. 20 November 2015.
"Interwar modernism had shuttled between the extremes of high and low, between the values of “aristocracy” on the one hand and “primitivism” on the other…In the social class imaginary of the postwar period, the social distance traversed by the modernist dialectic is substantially narrowed: the crucial distinction here is between an upper middle class, for whom economic security is a given and higher education is understood as a virtual birthright, and the traditional working class, which instead of individual advancement through education offers its members the benefits of belonging and communal solidarity. The version of modernism that shuttles between these class positions [during the postwar period] is unable to come to rest in either of them..." (67)
The version of modernism identified by McGurl exists within a larger stratum of middlebrow culture, in which minimalism is arguably included. The socioeconomic climate had changed in the United States, and the demands of the growing middle class called for more palatable and digestible art forms that challenged the old highbrow and lowbrow classifications. These were the socioeconomic conditions that precipitated the rising popularity of minimalism.
This essay will attempt to analyze how the ascent of minimalism converged with socioeconomic changes in midcentury America. As the middle class widened in the United States, the appeal of middlebrow culture grew accordingly, all the while marginalizing the old aesthetic division of art as highbrow or lowbrow. A.O. Scott describes the duality of highbrow and lowbrow culture in his New York Times essay, “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow” as such: “A world of landlords and peasants, of masters and servants, of patrons and workers is one in which art and life harmonize…an intellectual feudal system, in which the lowbrows do the work and create folk arts, and the highbrows do the thinking and create fine arts.” Just as class dictated appropriate artistic guidelines in prewar society, the evolution of artistic standards and socioeconomic distinctions in postwar society also cannot be considered as separate phenomena. In the changing reality of socioeconomic classifications in midcentury America, minimalism proved to be an accessible art form for the growing middle class, though critics dismissed the form for its simplicity, degeneration, and theatricality. While none of these critiques were explicitly anti-middlebrow, almost all of the objections made against minimalism were rooted in arguments that were inherently classist. Ultimately, while minimalism is an innovative art form that should be noted for challenging conventional aesthetics during its heyday, it should also be considered as a political statement that challenged the elitist dual categorization of art as exclusively either highbrow or lowbrow in the postwar period.
Perhaps the definition of middlebrow culture can best be explained by indicating the audience to which it appealed: the new middle class that had arisen in postwar America. The growth of the middle class was a direct result of “the collapse of older social hierarchies, the decline of inherited privilege, and the rise of a new meritocratic order” (Scott, “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow”) that filled the social, economic, and cultural vacuum left in the wake of early twentieth century instability. The population boomed and industry blossomed; Americans had higher wages, more leisure time, access to higher education, and widely available music, literature, and films with incredible variation in style. These opportunities could release individuals from any particular class designation into the amorphous potentiality and mobility of the American middle; and as this class continued to grow, the content and form of the culture it consumed needed to change as well. The outdated and elitist highbrow culture was unappealing to modern Americans, as it was rooted in academia and aristocracy. The lowbrow classification was equally as unattractive; lowbrows are defined by Scott as “those who are as committed to living as highbrows are to thinking.” Middlebrow culture and its paperback literature, commercialized music, and according to some critics, minimalist artwork, was appealing in its accessibility and absorbability. This was the reality of the modern postwar period: the newly-born middle class of educated and financially stable masses fit neither in highbrow or lowbrow class distinctions, and lived in an era of growing consumerism, materialism, globalization, and immediacy.
Disillusioned with the prewar duality of highbrow and lowbrow aesthetics that was preserved by old, static, and hierarchical social classifications, the middle class embraced the middlebrow. But what exactly was so contemptible about welcoming a new cultural dimension? Critics of minimalism felt as though “something—variously called sophistication, authenticity, seriousness or just art—was being lost as the old, unbudging, quasi-feudal hierarchy of upper and lower was replaced by the hectic scrum of mass and middle” (Scott, “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow”). The frustration with middlebrow culture was that it encouraged upward mobility of lowbrows and celebrated the fallen standards of highbrows. High culture became more accessible and popular culture became more ambitious; the resulting middlebrow culture was dismissed as either pretentious or mediocre. Decades before Scott’s essay was published, Clement Greenberg called middlebrow culture in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” an “ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide” (543). Greenberg outlines the highbrow and lowbrow classes as being either cultivated or ignorant, respectively, and claims that whatever exists between those distinctions is commercialized, popularized, overtly emotional, and has no genuine cultural value (544-546). Ultimately, Greenberg’s critique of kitsch—the art form of middlebrow culture—brings to light one of the main arguments against minimalism: it offers instantaneous gratification to the audience without intellectual effort or subliminal artistic understanding. Influenced heavily by Greenberg, critic Michael Fried would famously utilize a similar classist argument later on in the twentieth century against minimalism.
Greenberg’s and Fried’s critiques mean very little without understanding how exactly minimalism fit into midcentury American social conditions. Why exactly was minimalism attractive to the middle class, and what elements of its form characterize it as middlebrow culture? According to Duncan Chesney in his article, “Beckett, Minimalism, and the Question of Postmodernism,” the increased leisure time of the growing middle class produced a need and subsequent market for modernist art, especially minimalism:
"The growth of this market, through which the very notion of art, artist, artistic production, and consumption were changed, was partially masked by the ideology of autonomy. Art was released from its courtly, ritual, and religious roles in a breakdown of the system of patronage, and thus the artist became free, his work serving only artistic ends." (638)
Minimalism responded directly to this changing reality. The form became closer to the audience, and subsequently the details surrounding the artist, their patron, and their craft became less distinguished. Minimalism was an art form that was dictated by no one, and therefore it could belong to anyone. In his essay “Specific Objects” the artist Donald Judd, considered as the reluctant founder of minimalist aesthetics, argued, “It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting” (827). Essentially, Judd suggested that the only action the spectator must take do enjoy a work of art is to feel. Minimalist art, whether it be literature, painting, sculpture, or music, is simplified to the point of being only interesting, emotive, and necessary. These were requirements fulfilled easily by both middle class artists and consumers of minimalist art in midcentury America.
Minimalism encourages audiences to engage with objective material so as to invoke some type of individualized, subjective response. There is no necessity for institution, money, or education; rather, minimalist work emphasizes the experience of the audience (whatever that may be) rather than the formal intentions of the establishment or the author. For instance, John Cage’s minimalist musical composition 4’33” has often been considered by critics of minimalism as reduction to the extreme. The piece instructs performers not to play their instruments for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds, and for that amount of time, the audience listens to silence, intermittently disrupted by incidental sounds of human life, such as coughing, laughter, or whispering. The piece is entirely experiential, temporal, and relative; it is instantly gratifying, and easy to understand regardless of class or educational differences. As Donald Judd argues in his essay, the difference between a musical composition by the likes of highbrow Mozart or Beethoven and Cage’s 4’33” is that Cage’s piece is a form that is “open and extended, more or less environmental” (826). The middle class appealed to this art form because it was encompassing across many lines of education and economic affordability; minimalism separated itself from Greenberg’s financed highbrow elites and also conceptually rose above the limitations of lowbrow culture. Beyond the musical work of Cage, minimalist writers such as Beckett could similarly appeal to an audience that levitates in the realm between highbrow and lowbrow. Because minimalism first developed around visual art, such as Donald Judd’s sculptures, the application of the form to literature has always been a bit more complex. Minimalism as language is complicated in that it is never fully objective, because every word has meaning and reference. Its stylistic requirements according to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics are as follows: “[minimalism] holds that sparseness, tautness, understatement, and reduction constitute poetic authenticity” (886). Therefore, minimalist literature is not only brief in its form, but also concise in its content.
The specific prose utilized by Samuel Beckett in his work, especially in “Imagination Dead Imagine,” aligns with both this definition and the environmental elements similar to Cage’s music. Beckett’s work is incredibly spatial and temporal in the way that it directs the reader: “No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA. Lying on the ground two white bodies, each in its semicircle” (Beckett, “Imagination Dead Imagine”). Rigorously visual and controlling of the physical environment, “Imagination Dead Imagine” has a plot and characters, yet they have both been reduced to simple frames. The characters have no characteristics that might suggest their personalities or appearances or individuality. They are no one and therefore could be anyone. Such an approach, described by John Barth in “A Few Words About Minimalism” is meant to leave the story unornamented, as Beckett seeks to “strip away the superfluous in order to reveal the necessary, the essential.” Author Duncan Chesney argues further that Beckett reduces his work to the point where it lacks any logical following at all: “Beckett had long exercised a practice of aesthetic self-denial, of conventional elements of drama and prose fiction, or rather (since such elements as character, setting, plot, and so forth cannot be entirely eradicated) of their plausibility or believability” (645). Therefore because Samuel Beckett’s work lacks explicit authorial intention, understanding his pieces has only one requirement: imagination. The artistic content of the work lies in the reader’s own interpretation of what they think Beckett was attempting to say. Ultimately, even Beckett might not even understand his own commentary; he’s more interested in directing the reader than he is in conveying his own message. Much like the music of John Cage, Beckett’s work does not require patronage or education or a determined level of class to be appreciated.
Yet to claim that both Cage and Beckett are excluded from the conceptual and fiscal preconditions of highbrow art is to arguably disregard the evolution of the minimalist form throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Is there not something elitist about understanding the artistic history, staged form, and social commentary behind both Cage’s and Beckett’s work? Undoubtedly their artistic style was innovative in the postwar period, but does that mean that it was separated completely from the highbrow? In Walter Benn Michaels’ essay, “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière and the Form of the Photograph,” Michaels points out that although the original idea behind 4’33” was to refuse to impose the composer’s intentions on the listeners, Cage’s intentional lack of artistic intention causes his work to drift into highbrow domain: “when you seek to create a work in which only the accidents matter, then not only is the recognition of your intention to do just that crucial, but also the audience’s actual experience becomes irrelevant—all that that matters is that they recognize your intention… the identity of the work consists in nothing but its ‘point’” (Michaels). It could be argued that an informed, highbrow understanding of history and aesthetics is necessary to arrive at Cage’s ‘point’ and that Beckett’s “Imagination Dead Imagine” requires a similar educational background because of his artistic direction—or lack thereof. However, the question of Beckett and Cage being potentially considered as highbrow minimalist artists ultimately lies in what specifically the ‘right’ or ‘correct’ point is to understand about this kind of minimalist work. A middle class individual might take something completely different away from a piece by Beckett or Cage than a high class individual—who is to say which of these experiences is legitimate? To claim that an interpretation by one spectator is correct while another is not, especially when the intention of the work in question is to be unintentional, is precisely the kind of classist, establishment argument that middlebrow minimalism challenges.
However, the minimalist fiction born after the era of Cage, Judd, and Beckett—specifically the work of Raymond Carver—is clearly popularized to a point in which it does not require any level of historical or formal understanding to be enjoyed. Writers such as Lydia Davis and Raymond Carver absolutely follow Judd’s, Cage’s, and Beckett’s example in simplifying their artistic message through reduction. In Carver’s piece “Neighbors” he tediously outlines the behavior of Bill and Arlene Miller in their neighbors’ empty apartment: “He finished the drink and took off the suit. He rummaged through the top drawers until he found a pair of panties and a brassiere. He stepped into the panties and fastened the brasserie” (12). Carver never explicitly comments on the peculiarity of Bill Miller wearing his neighbor’s female undergarments, but instead succinctly continues on with the story. This is because Carver does not consider his or his characters’ thoughts, opinions, or feelings as being necessary elements to include in the piece. In Robert Clark’s analysis of Carver’s career and work, “Keeping the Reader in the House” he notes that,
"The core idea that differentiates the mode [minimalism] from other movements is that prose and poetry should be extremely efficient, allusive, and implicative...The language in this type of fiction tends to be simple and direct. Narrators do not often use ornate adjectives and rarely offer effusive descriptions of scenery or extensive detail about characters' backgrounds." (106)
Clark’s analysis reinforces the minimalist belief that the interpretive significance of the artwork by the reader is more important than the artist himself. Carver’s contemporary, Lydia Davis, borrows from this seemingly mundane style in “Story,” except this time she tells the story from the first person, cutting out the artist’s presence as a narrator altogether: “I get home from work and there is a message from him: that he is not coming, that he is busy” (3). Thoughts and feelings are not conveyed—only action. Davis relies on the reader to pull emotion and subjectivity from the objectivity that she provides, and let the audience infer the rest. Like Beckett and Cage before them, to understand work written by Davis and Carver does not require a nuanced aesthetic understanding of form or history; their work is both for and about their middle class, middlebrow audiences.
Without a doubt this work can be considered as middlebrow; but why exactly is this distinction so much clearer for Carver and Davis than it was for their predecessors, Cage and Beckett? What exactly distinguishes these authors from their early minimalist peers? Minimalism under the likes of Carver is derisively dismissed as “K-mart realism…Diet-Pepsi minimalism” (Barth) precisely because of its commercial and popular appeal. In fact, according to Mark McGurl this kind of minimalism closely borders what he would consider lowbrow culture: “a domain of professional activity and camaraderie in which the desperate tackiness and dailiness of American lower-middle-class life is meant to be retained but somehow, against all odds, dignified, aestheticized” (281). This later form of minimalism stands in stark contrast to the intentionally complex and aesthetically conscious works of Cage and Beckett, in that Carver and Davis are much more concerned with connecting to their audiences by directly depicting their expected middle class readers in their middlebrow work, rather than producing art that presents larger abstract concepts on which their audiences should reflect. Carver and Davis arguably supplant their own content into ready-made aesthetic frameworks established by Cage and Beckett before them; the difference between the two lies precisely in their levels of abstraction and innovation. Carver and Davis play into the hands of an already established artistic style; for example, their work lacks authorial intention not necessarily to achieve any greater end regarding the audience’s response, but arguably because the precedent set by Beckett and Carver does not require them to have one. McGurl critiques specifically Carver’s minimalist form as such: “its literary products have no history—no history to speak of, let alone monumentalize…in the lower-middle-class world of ‘Carver Country’…[minimalism] is completely disconnected from the nexus of money and media, race and identity, personality and power (279). A summarized critique might be that Carver’s minimalism lacks depth and a durable historical connection; its aesthetic importance is limited by the primacy of a temporal audience. Can the work of Carver and Davis survive without their middleclass, middlebrow readers to identify with their stories? Arguably, this difference in duration is precisely what separates early minimalist work from its later forms. However, despite these internal differences, the work of Beckett, Cage, Carver, and Davis fall within the aesthetic middlebrow space between highbrow and lowbrow culture because of their accessibility and absorbability—though admittedly they seem to be leaning towards opposite ends within the middlebrow spectrum.
What was so contemptible about a middlebrow form that was accessible to a wider populous of people, such as the middle class? Why exactly do critics of minimalism dislike this kind of art coming out of midcentury America? In his analysis of Raymond Carver’s work, Robert Clark perhaps best outlines the primary concern held by minimalism’s toughest critics: “Minimalist stories often require readers to ‘assemble’ images and allusions in order to make a coherent, complete narrative” (107). It is precisely this kind of aesthetic agency by the spectator that is lamented by critics of minimalist art. In his essay “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried dismisses minimalism as theatrical, and considers Donald Judd’s new aesthetic form to be “the negation of art…because it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist [minimalist] work” (838). Fried’s concern with minimalist work is that its aesthetic significance does not exist without an audience. In fact, it cannot reasonably be called art without spectators precisely because it exists solely for them. What value does Cage’s music have without his audience? What do the works of Beckett, Davis, and Carver achieve without their readers to infer the details they intentionally omit? Minimalism emphasized the individualized, environmental, and temporal experience of the average person, and Fried feared that the artist’s craft, as well as the quality of highbrow art, were being lost in the new form. Fried’s view of art is that it should cause an individual to lose themselves and their awareness in a separate object; not make the viewer or reader more aware of their own presence. For this reason he believed that “art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre” (843) because by encouraging the audience’s response and not the author’s aesthetic capability, minimalism subordinates the agency of the artist and subsequently, the value of their artwork.
But how exactly are these formal artistic objections to minimalism rooted in classism? Critics of the form disliked that the audience was more involved in the aesthetic process, and furthermore, that their involvement in such a process relied less and less on a refined understanding of art, but rather more upon a deeper understanding of themselves as spectators. This is the point where Fried’s own anti-minimalist manifesto echoes Greenberg’s blatant objection to kitsch because of its emotional, commercial, and popularized middlebrow appeal. Fried was against the progress made in postwar society and the subsequent evolution of aesthetic standards that followed because they implied that the artist need not excel in their craft and the viewer need not study aesthetics, form, or history to understand form. An increase in spectatorship and a decline in specialized skill could only suggest that the quality of the art was falling in standard. The more people came to see these art forms, the farther it fell from the highbrow distinction. However, because minimalism required some basic understanding of artistic concepts, imagination, and deep feeling, the lowbrow distinction was not appropriate either. Minimalism, in the eyes of the critic, lived among the middlebrows. Anyone could experience and enjoy Cage’s music or Beckett’s plays or Davis and Carver’s writings, because there were no socioeconomic limitations that prohibited them from doing so. Essentially, Fried took issue with the accessibility of minimalist art. The more art became accessible in its theatricality, the more audiences failed “to register the enormous difference in quality between, say, the music of Carter and that of Cage or between the paintings of Louis and those of Rauschenberg…” (843). Minimalist work was popularized by an unprecedented reliance on the individual, specifically emphasizing its availability to the average man instead of the intellectual, the patron, or the aristocrat. As Clement Greenberg feared in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, minimalist artists and authors began to close the gap between the highbrow avant-garde (art considered as intellectual and aesthetically complex) and kitsch (art Greenberg believed was for the masses; commercialized and emotional) by breaking down the ‘requirements’ of understanding complex art and texts.
In the very same essay Clement Greenberg also outlines what has become an intriguing complication for minimalist art in the contemporary era. Greenberg conceptualized avant-garde art as functioning to keep ‘true’ culture alive in the face of capitalism and kitsch, though paradoxically this form “has always remained attached [to society] by an umbilical cord of gold” (Greenberg 542). Essentially, Greenberg noted that the survival of the avant-garde was dependent on the funding of art by an elite ruling class. At the time he wrote his essay, Greenberg was well aware that the rise of academicism and commercialism were indicative of the decline in power of “the rich and the cultivated” (542) but A.O. Scott fulfilled Greenberg’s worst fears when he outlined a new social hierarchy being established in contemporary times: “The highbrows were co-opted or killed off by the middle, and the elitism they championed has been replaced by another kind, the kind that measures all value, cultural and otherwise, in money.” Essentially, the class and cultural distinctions discussed in this essay are more impermanent than they appear. It could be argued that minimalism can only be considered middlebrow for a limited amount of time in American history, and that the soaring prosperity that surrounded the growth of the middle class can also be held responsible for the commercialization of culture. Modern art, especially minimalism, is becoming increasingly popularized, as well as tied to capital, as the U.S. has moved out of the postwar era into the contemporary era. Modernist art, specifically minimalist works, are appearing more frequently in galleries, universities, markets, and among the wealthy: “The art world spins in an orbit of pure money. Museums chase dollars with crude commercialism aimed at the masses and the slavish cultivation of wealthy patrons” (Scott). This begs the larger question: is minimalism, and modernism in general, becoming the new highbrow culture? According to Scott, it would not be inaccurate to say that minimalism is attached to society by an umbilical cord of gold, but Greenberg might be alarmed to know that such an attachment was motivated by popularization, and that the other end of the cord is controlled by the new societal elite: the middle class.
The growing demands of the middle-class in the postwar era called for a new art form, unlimited by elitist requirements such as education and money, and free from the institutionalized boundaries of highbrow and lowbrow culture. As Clement Greenberg noted, “a social interval has always existed in formal culture, as elsewhere in civilized society, and whose two termini converge and diverge in fixed relation to the increasing or decreasing stability of a certain society” (546). However, when the instability of this dual cultural system was exposed in the postwar era, minimalism was the art form that responded to the needs of the middle class that had blossomed from between the highbrows and lowbrows. Artists like Judd, Cage, Beckett, Davis, and Carver created reduced and simplistic works that needed only to interest their audiences—the aesthetic process was slowly turning toward the average spectator and away from the artist, their craft, and their work. Critics such as Greenberg and Fried decried and lamented the minimalist form as being degenerate, in that it encouraged commercialization and popularization by middleclass individuals, and jeopardized the integrity and quality of highbrow art. However, these arguments were rooted in prewar classist structures and systems that contrasted starkly with progressive middlebrow culture in midcentury America—and yet minimalism has arguably realigned itself with this same kind of social inequality in the modern era, only this time drawn by the capital offered by the middle class masses. Ultimately minimalism’s appeal and absorbability among middle class artists and audiences alike challenged the boundaries of aesthetic form as much as it challenged prewar socioeconomic norms.
Works Cited
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Cage, John. “4’33.”” Musical composition. 1952.
Carver, Raymond. “Neighbors.” Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: The Stories of Raymond Carver. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. 7-14. Print.
Chesney, Duncan McColl. “Beckett, Minimalism, and the Question of Postmodernism.”Modernism/modernity 19.4 (2012): 637-655. Web.
Clark, Robert. “Keeping the Reader in the House: American Minimalism, Literary
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Davis, Lydia. “The Story.” Break It Down. New York: FSG Classics, 2008. 3-6. Print.
Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 835-846. Print.
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Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 824-828.Print.
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2009. Print.
Michaels, Walter Benn. “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière and the Form of the Photograph.” Issue I. Nonsite.org, 25 January 2011. Web. 8 December 2015.
“Minimalism.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics and Poetry. 4th ed. 2013. 886-887. Print.
Scott, A.O. “The Squeeze on the Middlebrow.” Arts. The New York Times, 1 August 2014.Web. 20 November 2015.