There exists a mode of cultural production that cuts across every medium and answers to no single art. It is found in the philosopher who offers complexity as a kind of balm, in the historian who narrates the whole of the species in an afternoon, in the essayist who dispenses the canon as emotional consolation, in the songwriter whose hook is their own confessed complicity, in the painter of lit windows and gentle weather, of a world from which the cold has been painted out. The list is long, the names are irrelevant, because they are examples of many figures who share neither technique nor tradition but only a function, and that function is my subject. They produce artifacts whose primary virtue is their capacity to make the recipient feel intelligent, recognized, or refined without ever incurring the cost of difficulty. They produce, in a word, reassurance. And they are, in the precise sense that Dwight Macdonald gave the term in Masscult and Midcult, practitioners of the middlebrow, which, as Macdonald warned, is more insidious than mere kitsch because it “pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.”
A Culture of Counterfeit Reassurance
