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Roll Over Beethoven, there's a New way to be Cool
Richard A. Peterson
Contexts 2002 1: 34
DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2002.1.2.34
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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.
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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.
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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
through life “on the straight and narrow” path. Riesman iden-
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.
tified 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-
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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
Photo by Adrian Graham
The full ramifications of the shift from highbrow snob to
cosmopolitan omnivore in the second half of the 20th centu-
ry 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
Household CD storage rack with eclectic range of music.
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summer 2002 contexts
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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.
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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
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
recommended resources
American audiences for the fine arts are rapidly aging.
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.
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.
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
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.
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