1. Gans, Herbert J., Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1974).Google Scholar

2. This paper will not deal with the possible disjunctions between taste cultures and people's needs or demands.

3. Aesthetic is used very broadly in this analysis, for I am discussing standards of what people think is beautiful, good, and also enjoyable, informative, and inspiring.

4. Lynes, Russell, The Tastemakers (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955)Google Scholar, Chapter 13. The chapter appeared originally as an article in the February 1949 issue of Harper's Magazine.

5. Brooks, Van Wyck, America's Coming of Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915)Google Scholar, Chapter 1. Brooks also described highbrows as reflecting the Puritan theology of Jonathan Edwards; and lowbrows, the pragmatism of Benjamin Franklin. Brooks disapproved of both highbrows and lowbrows, implying a desirable middle type but never specifying its qualities. However, he wrote approvingly of then-modern American writers, notably Walt Whitman. The terms highbrow and lowbrow Brooks borrowed from the vernacular, where they had first appeared at the turn of the century. Nelson, Raymond, Van Wyck Brooks: A Writer's Life (New York: E. P. Button, 1981) p. 103.Google Scholar

6. Lynes, , Tastemakers, p. 310.Google Scholar

7. Edward Shils also described levels of culture, but labeled his trilogy superior or refined, mediocre, and brutal, thus indicating clearly where he stood, even though the essay in which he presented the three levels was one of the first favorable discussions of mass culture. Shils, Edward, “Mass Society and Its Culture,” in Jacobs, Norman, ed., Culture for the Millions: Mass Media in Modern Society (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1961) Chapter 1, especially pp. 4–7.Google Scholar

8. Warner, W. Lloyd and Lunt, Paul S., The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941)Google Scholar. I did not borrow Warner's emphasis on prestige in determining class position, however.

9. Gans, , Popular Culture, p. 68.Google Scholar

10. This may be one reason why Van Wyck Brooks associated highbrows with theologians.

11. The best of recent empirical studies questioning the pathology of the mass media is Hirsch, Paul M.: “The ‘Scary World’ of the Nonviewer and Other Anomalies,” and “On Not Learning from One's Own Mistakes,” Communication Research, 7, No. 4 (10 1980), pp. 403–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and 8, No. 1 (January 1981), pp. 3–38. For a literary analysis along somewhat the same line, see Brant-linger, Patrick, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

12. Although Brantlinger interpreted my position as “a pragmatic liberalism [that] reconciles democracy and massification in a way that … cannot be squared with reality,” I actually connected what he calls massification with economic inequality. Brantlinger, , Bread and Circuses, p. 10Google Scholar. Still, Brantlinger is right that I did not see the commercial mass media as a threat to democracy. While he is worried by the “monopolistic, perhaps even totalitarian, tendencies of the mass media” (ibid.), I think the dangers to democracy lie elsewhere, in economic and political inequalities.

13. Riesman, David's interest in national character is apparent in The Lonely Crowd, which is subtitled A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).Google Scholar

14. Medievalists tend, however, to use popular culture to describe virtually all non-elite activities. See Kaplan, Steve, ed., Understanding Popular Culture (Leiden, Holland: E. J. Brill, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A comprehensive analysis based on a narrower definition is by Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).Google Scholar

15. The routines and strategies of everyday social life that Erving Goffman and his followers study are not described as popular culture, however, perhaps because they are not commercially produced. Also, Goffman's analyses rarely used class concepts and generally ignored class differences.

16. In my original study, I devoted a good deal of attention to comparing what I called creator-orientation and user-orientation, describing the effects of viewing culture from the point of view of its creators and from that of its users.

17. Macdonald, Dwight, “A Theory of Culture,” in Rosenberg, Bernard and White, David M., eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), pp. 59–73.Google Scholar

18. See, e.g., DiMaggio, Paul, “Market Structures, the Creative Process and Popular Culture: Toward an Organizational Interpretation of Mass Culture Theory,” Journal of Popular Culture, 11, No. 2, (Fall 1977), 462–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hirsch, Paul M., “An Organizational Perspective on Television,” in Withey, Stephen B. and Abeles, Ronald, eds., Television and Social Behavior (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum Associates, 1980), pp. 83–102Google Scholar; and Peterson, Richard A., ed., The Production of Culture (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1976)Google Scholar. For a recent organizational study, see Gitlin, Todd, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).Google Scholar

19. It is not entirely novel, for the socialist critics who treated mass culture as a capitalist product began with a simpler version of roughly the same frame of reference—e.g., Macdonald, , “A Theory of Culture.”Google Scholar

20. Gans, Herbert J., Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).Google Scholar

21. Goodhardt, G. J., Ehrenberg, A. S. C., Collins, M. A., and Aske Research Ltd., The Television Audience: Patterns of Viewing (Westmead, England and Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1975)Google Scholar; and Gans, Herbert J., “The Audience for Television—and in Television Research,”Google Scholar in Withey, and Abeles, , Television and Social Behavior, pp. 55–82.Google Scholar

22. Peterson, Richard A., “Patterns of Cultural Choice: A Prolegomenon,” American Behavioral Scientist, 26, No. 4 (03–04 1983), 422–438CrossRefGoogle Scholar. James Davis has recently reanalyzed a number of national attitude surveys and found so little correlation between class and culture that he concluded that the notion of class culture is no longer valid. However, he also reports that education, an important class variable, best predicts variations in attitude; and I doubt that answers to standardized poll questions about attitudes are good indicators of culture. Davis, James A., “Achievement Variables and Class Cultures,” American Sociological Review, 47, No. 5 (10 1982), 569–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Blau, Peter M. and Duncan, Otis D., The American Occupational Structure (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967).Google Scholar

24. Featherman, David L. and Hauser, Robert M., Opportunity and Change (New York: Academic Press, 1978).Google Scholar

25. David Riesman already saw the rise of peer influence a generation earlier.

26. DiMaggio reports that in nineteenth-century Boston, European professionals were imported by the Brahmin founders of museums and symphony orchestras to set and implement universal high-culture standards, using these to determine what art and music was henceforth to be excluded as vulgar. DiMaggio, Paul, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and Society, 4, No. 1, (01 1982), 33–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Lasch, Christopher, “Mass Culture Reconsidered,” Democracy, 1, No. 4 (10 1981), 7–22Google Scholar; Macdonald, , “A Theory of Culture.”Google Scholar

28. Gans, Herbert J., “Culture, Community and Equality,” Democracy, 2, No. 2 (04 1982), 81–87Google Scholar. For a recent defense of high culture closer to the traditional Left position, see Gitlin, , Inside Prime Time.Google Scholar

29. DiMaggio, Paul and Useem, Michael, “Social Class and Arts Consumption: The Origins and Consequences of Class Differences in Exposure to the Arts in America,” Theory and Society, 5, No. 2 (03 1978), 41–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. Radway, Janice A., Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Culture, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), Chapter 1.Google Scholar

31. Wilensky, Harold L., “Mass Society and Mass Culture: Interdependence or Dependence,” American Sociological Review, 29, No. 2 (04 1964), 173–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. Coleman, Richard P. and Rainwater, Lee, Social Standing in America (New York: Basic Books, 1978)Google Scholar is the exception that proves the rule.

33. In fact, the Caritas Corporation of Arlington, Virginia has developed an analysis of “market clusters” that resembles my taste-publics, and analyzes their class position by a match-up of Postal Service Zip Codes with Census demographic data. Heller, Karen, “Hot on the Press,” Washington Journalism Review, 6, No. 3 (04 1984), 26–31Google Scholar. Unfortunately, market data like these are proprietary and therefore not available to scholars, and scholars can rarely afford to conduct empirical research on taste because it is so expensive.

34. George Lewis has developed a “multinucleated” model of cultures and publics in which the ladder has become horizontal. Lewis, George H., “Taste Cultures and Their Composition: Toward a New Theoretical Perspective,” in Katz, Elihu and Szecsko, Tamas, eds., Mass Media and Social Change (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1981), pp. 201–18.Google Scholar

35. A provocative critique of the new upper class- government- high culture alliance, from the Libertarian Right, can be found in Banfield, Edward C., The Democratic Muse: Visual Arts and the Public Interest (New York: Basic Books, 1984).Google Scholar