These stores maintain some of the imagination that propelled J. Crew out of the middlebrow into the upper middlebrow, though they have their own limitations.
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Donald Trump has created a political aesthetic of the middlebrow.
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A 1949 spread in Life magazine lay out "Everyday Tastes from High Brow to Low Brow are Classified in this Chart," including ballet (highbrow), theater (upper-middlebrow), front-yard sculpture (lower middlebrow), and coleslaw (lowbrow).
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Now he heads the English department at a "midsized, middlebrow" university.
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It was surprisingly edgy, surprisingly highbrow, and unsurprisingly disdainful of the middlebrow.
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The use of Beethoven's Fifth as interstitial music suggests only middlebrow ambition.
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Butler also takes Millie back home to her clueless, middlebrow parents' house.
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In the minds of middlebrow America, Kunta Kinte was replaced by Bill Cosby.
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Why scold something that doesn't even pretend to be high or even middlebrow?
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Middlebrow watch enthusiasts would pay more than $1,000 for a stainless steel version.
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Famuyiwa directs it like a middlebrow prestige picture, all tasteful compositions and somber music.
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Indeed, the overly sentimental, middlebrow, American cheerleader parody of Burns is far from accurate.
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Mr. Gove's wife, Sarah Vine, is also a journalist, a Lady Macbeth of middlebrow letters.
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Mr. Starr, for his part, takes issue with those who characterize him as resolutely middlebrow.
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Most of me will always want some version of this middlebrow entertainment in my life.
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"'Woman in Gold' might be the epitome of middlebrow moviemaking," Wesley Morris wrote in The Times.
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As this list shows, the influence travels from the highbrow to the middlebrow to the lowbrow.
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Yeah, and then we're back to my big thing about the Middlebrow, kind of, I think.
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These books are not middlebrow; that is, they are not earnest pretenders to art and edification.
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But for decades, awarding a Pulitzer to a musical wouldn't have been a safe, respectable middlebrow choice.
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" He suggests that Robert Hass "has made a career out of flattering middlebrow sensibilities with cheap mystery.
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This is a surprisingly middlebrow concept for a supposedly highbrow jukebox presentation, and the visuals don't help.
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That is, it has abandoned the kind of middlebrow historical epics that used to be a shoo-in.
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For prog artists with lofty pretensions to high art, "middlebrow" may be the most stinging insult of all.
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So, for some examples, I had also a column called Middlebrow at HuffPost, which was pop culture analysis.
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Taking a middlebrow, mildly rollicking approach to a serious subject, "The Divine Order" doesn't exactly break new ground.
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The novel's protagonist, an office girl in a company that makes hosiery, lives at home with her middlebrow parents.
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" All of this made their writing and thinking "radically different from the accepted modes of scholarly publishing and middlebrow journalism.
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There were kiosks specializing in street food from regions like Puglia and Calabria, as well as high-end and middlebrow restaurants.
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Major American studios have been releasing less, and middle-tier, middlebrow, midbudget adult movies are now virtually nonexistent as a priority.
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The rest of the lineup has long been heavy on political talk shows, middlebrow police dramas and second-rate TV movies.
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The arrangements were meant to appeal to a wholesome, middlebrow Soviet ear, but also to suggest an ancient Russian musical essence.
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Facebook TV will be middlebrow entertainment, coming in just above homemade YouTube videos, but well below the likes of Netflix and HBO.
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What sustained this temporary cultural moment, middlebrow and crass in all sorts of ways but still more successfully humanistic than our own?
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His formative years at Time and Life left a deadening, middlebrow mark on his style, blunting the edges of an otherwise singular perspective.
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It's the specific romantic/political/intellectual triumvirate that makes middlebrow critics prick up their ears and ride to the defense of an artist.
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Hootie became, to some, a punch line — shorthand for the kind of middlebrow rock music that arrived in the wake of grunge's demise.
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Lively's prose is sharp, precise, perfectly pitched, but shrinks from flashiness in a way that has sometimes been mistaken for cozy or middlebrow.
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Most of them bore the distinct trappings of upper-middlebrow art—they were the sorts of movie that attract critical plaudits and awards.
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In 2003, Carl Andre horrified the middlebrow city of Hartford, Connecticut, with "Stone Field," a precise arrangement of 2200 boulders pulled from nearby quarries.
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It also turns the high-middlebrow Cavendishes into lowbrows, and Bert and Kitty, who in the original are merely "mediocre," into mortifying no-talents.
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In that way they will be even more like the studios of yore, which would make prestige films, middlebrow fare and drive-in fodder.
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It can be as high, low, or middlebrow as you want — infinitely customizable, the cheese ball is all about what you put into it.
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The aim to diversify the movies looks like it's taking hold just as there are fewer middlebrow studio movies and streaming is becoming king.
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" In what we would now call a bid to troll the middlebrow, his editor instead supplied the proto-clickbait headline "Who Cares if You Listen?
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Owens's mid-career works feel completely sterile, mainstream, and middlebrow — with just enough insider info to flatter the viewer who knows something about Roland Barthes.
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Indeed, it could be argued that Weinstein's true talent wasn't so much as a filmmaker (where his taste was frankly middlebrow) but rather in publicity.
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Some critics dismissed Wouk as a middlebrow writer but his books - many of them bestsellers with a focus on moral dilemmas - showed a broad range.
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But if hunting isn't your bag, the Eater website has devoted itself to exhaustive coverage of the slow decline of the middlebrow suburban dining chain.
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At one extreme, water is depicted as tranquil and soothing, as in Monet's lily ponds or the quiescent middlebrow beach scenes hung in waiting rooms.
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I grew up in rural France with just three channels, but at least they regularly showed classics and middlebrow comedies; I learned to enjoy both.
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This lunatic is no more a fan of the aesthetic comforts of narrative middlebrow art than he is of the challenges of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.
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Did he belong with the irredeemably middlebrow James Gould Cozzens and Thomas B. Costain, or popular but respectable writers like John P. Marquand and James Michener?
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Lopez's play strikes an upper-middlebrow tone, with knowing remarks about "Jules et Jim" and Constantine Cavafy, the Greek poet, who was a friend of Forster's.
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In that play Ms. Findlay portrayed a suburban woman deathly afraid of cats, and there's something defensively middlebrow, despite the advanced degree, about her Hazel, too.
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Yet the exhibition it has put on, which done differently could have shone a light on or drawn parallels to past struggles, is an underwhelming, middlebrow affair.
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If you've been on Facebook this week, you've likely noticed one of your low-to-middlebrow political friends posting this website: Cape Breton If Donald Trump Wins.
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Von Holzhausen instead decided to do what he hadn't previously done, and what Tesla had avoided, which was to blow minds rather than hew to middlebrow sensibilities.
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As in so many middlebrow period dramas, the vintage cars are too shiny, the clothes too smart, the upper-class accents too strained and the dialogue too contrived.
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D'Souza, who made his name in the 1990s fighting campus political correctness, once had a reputation as a middlebrow conservative provocateur, but he's really more gutter-dwelling troll.
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Johnson Smith and its ads didn't reach high culture like Taboola has, but they showed up in firmly middlebrow fare like Popular Mechanics, Field & Stream, and Boys' Life.
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Whether Real Life will prove to be insightful and critical or middlebrow pop philosophy is hard to say, but I'd like to give it the benefit of the doubt.
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Otherwise, after several hundred years of life, Altered Carbon's Meths have settled on two hobbies: admiring the middlebrow neoclassical decor of their private sky mansions, and killing poor people.
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In this golden age of horror, when's the last time you went to the theater to see a scary movie and were rewarded with your average middlebrow doofy slasher?
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Ghost stories belong to — brace yourself for maximum Fiedlerian venom — "middlebrow craftsmen," who will peddle them to a rapidly dwindling audience and into an extinction that can't come soon enough.
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The shows became more focused on parodies and satires that riffed on television programs and middlebrow culture — and nurtured the sophisticated Nichols-May collaboration and Mr. Berman's stand-up routines.
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Wouk is often grouped with middlebrow writers of popular historical fiction — James Michener and Leon Uris, say — but his novels are better understood as pointillistic character studies in historical settings.
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The literary diet that emerges from these lists, mixing disposable genre fiction with unrepentant classics and, for the most part, skipping the indigestibly middlebrow, is one that I happen to share.
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What has changed since is that Hollywood has abandoned the kind of commercial, middlebrow epic that once dominated the Oscars—the likes of "Braveheart", "Titanic" and "Gladiator"—in favour of superhero blockbusters.
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Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads INDIANAPOLIS — In the mid-214s, when my new, Hoosier husband first took me to visit Indianapolis, the city seemed haunted by the ghosts of middlebrow culture.
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Aside from the miniature Jeff Koons-style sculptures adorning the tables, this year-and-a-half old place on a quiet side street looks like countless unremarkable middlebrow neighborhood restaurants in Paris.
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While the middlebrow Thalberg looked to the Broadway stage for inspiration, Laemmle was drawn to more sensational fare, producing "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" as well as the adultery melodramas directed by John M. Stahl.
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Critics of the Pulitzers sometimes suggest that the board's freedom to disregard the jury allows the board to ignore the experimental, avant garde, and exciting in favor of the safe and bland middlebrow.
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This is a bit passé now, but there was a day when everyone from vaunted intellectuals to middlebrow bourgeois New Yorker perusers suspected that Freud had the right idea about sex and society.
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Alan Thicke, the Canadian actor, singer and songwriter best remembered for his portrayal of the ultimate suburban middlebrow dispenser of parental advice on the sitcom "Growing Pains," died on Tuesday in Burbank, Calif.
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It purports to be taking the pulse of a nation, and capturing the voice of the population, but in favor of its own middlebrow posturing ignores the contexts governing that population's wildly varying experiences.
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Picking up from Adorno, the music historian Joseph Horowitz, while acknowledging Toscanini's greatness in " Understanding Toscanini " (1987), ridiculed his temperament and public persona, casting him as the false messiah of the middlebrow music-appreciation racket.
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That he was, as he remains, thoroughly enjoyable—and, worse back then, highly popular with middlebrow audiences—was more a debit than a credit in critical accounts that based approval on stern proofs of progress.
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" She does exactly that, demolishing Lehrer's approach as "a certain genre of canned, cocktail-party social science, one that traffics in bespoke platitudes for the middlebrow and rehearses the same studies without saying something new.
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It has been replaced and superseded, as the writers suggest, by sometimes exemplary specialized courses in social history, ethnic and race studies, and gender and identity studies, as well as by lowbrow and middlebrow culture studies.
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Kojin's leadoff appetizer is a griddled flatbread that is something like a yeast-raised arepa; you can wrap warm strips of it around Niagara ham and cherries or dunk it into a gleefully middlebrow spinach dip.
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There's nostalgia built into the domestic middlebrow furniture Ms. Reaves chooses; violence implied in the way she strips it of practical use; and something like solicitude in the way she gives trashed things a funky new purpose.
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It is Discovery's most ambitious and expensive project since Rich Ross took over as president of the channel two and a half years ago, vowing to re-energize its lineup of middlebrow and sometimes lowbrow reality fare.
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The Western in its Ford-Wayne heyday knew itself to be mainstream and middlebrow, but even in its gazillion-dollar apotheosis the world of "genre" still maintains a fan base that imagines itself eccentric and disrespected and oppressed.
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But there has also always been a faction of the Academy that cares deeply about the Oscars' reputation, as evidenced in part by voters' tendency to pick safe, middlebrow, respectable films over unique films that drive passionate response.
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A triumph of research and plot over character and subtlety, Clavell's historical novel about an Englishmen who goes native with the first Japanese shogun is the first among equals of the James Michener era of middlebrow informational epics.
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Both "My Struggle" and "Suits" are serial entertainments, with the difference that the TV show is a turbid middlebrow melodrama that places all of its aesthetic chips on plot — patently contrived story lines engineered to generate further incident.
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In the art world, he was a polarizing figure, known for popular, middlebrow shows like "The Art of the Motorcycle," in 1998, and, two years later, an exhibition of the couture of Giorgio Armani, sponsored by Giorgio Armani.
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What's unclear is whether Netflix will also stream its middlebrow movies (like Tall Girl or To All the Boys I've Loved Before) in theaters like the Paris, or whether it will only be used for its prestigious slate.
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The success of "Parasite" makes me wonder if the best picture win for a middlebrow nothing like "Green Book" last year was more anomalous than it seemed — that it represented more of a last gasp than a serious retrenchment.
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Millions may (and do) vouch for Koons's brand of high-production-value middlebrow art, but at least put a project like this to some kind of public review process and let the public do just that: vouch for him.
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Middlebrow Nashville was demanding reflexive-ness, or at least the performance of reflexive-ness, and Florida Georgia Line had little choice but to oblige, lest they become fixed to bro-country the way Billy Ray Cyrus remains fixed to line dancing.
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I mean, sure, this is a rich enclave of mostly white people, who would probably be into this sort of hopelessly middlebrow pop culture, but it's kinda weird that everybody is into what (I assume) David E. Kelley is into.
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But even if, as is fervently hoped, we are entering an age of stronger minority and female representation in cinema, without the mass audience that high-middlebrow cinema once enjoyed that representation's influence on the American imagination will be limited.
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Second, those who tend to flock to whatever we consider "highbrow" fare — and I include myself in this group — would do well to pay attention to more "middlebrow" genres we might have been tempted to write off in the past.
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So for every middlebrow masterpiece like Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon, there were crates of strange birds like Richard and Linda Thompson's devotional Sufi folk collection Pour Down Like Silver, and non-commercial fare like Gene Clark's maximalist No Other.
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Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer muddled through some rambling remarks, and as a group the Democrats held up minuscule fake candles—the kind you find at middlebrow restaurants—that were meant to symbolize the burning torch of the Statue of Liberty.
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Not surprisingly, he tells many fine theatre stories, most of them, as is the way in the history of the musical, tales of rage, resentment, and growing mutual mistrust, all in the cause of making two and a half hours of middlebrow entertainment.
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The monoculture seems to refer to some ill-defined age of universality made up of everything from Johnny Carson hosting the Tonight Show to Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office — the 2121th-century aegis of white, middlebrow American entertainment, usually starring white Americans.
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If one of those two is missing out, it's probably Lion, which has struggled at the box office and with critics (be honest: have you even heard of it?), but is also the sort of sappy middlebrow heart-warmer the Academy often loves.
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With a heady blend of marimba tones, bongo flourishes, bird calls, and even monkey screeches, the album felt like the furthest thing from the American living room, far beyond the craftsman homes, General Motors, and middlebrow taste native to most of the record-buying public.
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Greg Otis Brooklyn, N.Y. Sanneh's excellent survey of prog rock overlooked one explanation for why it came to dominate the United States mainstream in the seventies: its first fans were the last children of America's peak middlebrow culture, whether or not they'd call it that.
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Yet the major players in scripted TV — which include the most acclaimed cable networks like HBO and FX, but also the big four broadcast networks and a bunch of more middlebrow cable networks like USA and TNT — remain committed to keeping their slates mostly stable.
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Happily, the changes the creative team has instituted to make "Hercules" suitable today are entirely successful; much of the new material is better than the old, and the Public Works format is strong enough to transform even middlebrow mass entertainment into meaningful political theater.
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People seemed surprised that Banksy's "Balloon Girl" was voted Britain's most beloved artwork — beating out works by Henry Moore, John Constable, and JMW Turner — but the only real surprise is that the middlebrow street artist garnered more votes than tacky poster tycoon Jack Vettriano.
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Her opinions were admittedly bold and often flouted the consensus of her peers, but it was the writing itself — irreverent, erudite, uncompromising — that kept her fans coming back for more, even if they felt vaguely insulted by her cruelest put-downs of sappy sentiment and middlebrow complacency.
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Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads The bubbly, condensed Century Gothic sans serif font used on the 106 Green website to announce Leah Tacha: Fix Up, Look Sharp is the kind of typography you see on the cover of middlebrow fashion magazines from a few decades past.
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"I'm pretty allergic to the egocentric idea that it's all down to my taste, but I have to confess that I have always had this huge interest in early-20th-century fiction by women — what academics would call middlebrow, and I would call a good read," Beauman said.
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Portraiture got thrown into the wastebasket of the middlebrow after the abstract expressionists came calling in the middle of the 20th century: It's often talked about as a stale, outdated medium, one that both insists on narrow ideas of photorealism and imagines a stable, quantifiable identity for the subject.
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"I'm pretty allergic to the egocentric idea that it's all down to my taste, but I have to confess that I have always had this huge interest in early 20th-century fiction by women — what academics would call middlebrow, and I would call a good read," Beauman said.
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"A chief enforcer of the canon appears in middlebrow anthologies, those hangers on of high culture that in the Victorian period took the form of pop anthologies like Golden Treasury and today that of major college anthologies in America," Brown University English professor George P. Landow wrote on the scholarly website Victorian Web.
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These days, Eastwood works mostly on what might best be described as middlebrow prestige films: the war stories of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima; a Leonardo DiCaprio–starring biopic, J. Edgar; a drama about age and integration, Gran Torino; a tale of a decorated soldier in Iraq, American Sniper.
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One of the virtues (both civic and artistic) of the old mass-audience, high-middlebrow model was that it forced Hollywood to temper its own partisan inclinations because of the size of its intended audiences, to produce tacitly conservative Big Movies as well as liberal ones and reward them both at Oscar season.
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In the late '60s and early '70s, as independent films were diversifying their outlook and shaking off the formulas of Hollywood storytelling, Broadway boulevard comedies like "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" and "California Suite" — tales of the befuddled nouveau riche in a new world — began to look mass-produced and middlebrow.
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It has added hundreds of new members from outside the U.S. "The success of 'Parasite' makes me wonder if the best picture win for a middlebrow nothing like 'Green Book' last year was more anomalous than it seemed," said Manohla Dargis, in a conversation with fellow Times critics A.O. Scott and Wesley Morris.
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Upholding the family tradition of hostility, he agrees to review one of his brother Jay's novels for Boston magazine and trashes it: "At best a beach read, a middlebrow brick just a step above Judith Krantz or Belva Plain… a bizzare chiasmus, a Rumplestiltskin prank," its author a "name-promoting, self-absorbed" hack.
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Most recently, Gerbic's members have focused on what they call "grief vampires," that is, the kind of middlebrow psychics who profit by claiming to summon the dead in shows in venues ranging from casinos or any old Motel 21863 conference suite to wine vineyards or the Queen Mary permanently anchored in Long Beach.
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Austerlitz's article was indeed a hissy fit by the type of middlebrow whose mediocre taste in indie-rock is partially what inspired the poptimist reaction to begin with, but he did articulate a useful insight: he's not wrong to observe that pop stars have started getting more respect than they did, oh, ten years ago.
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There was the middlebrow upbringing in a provincial English town; the unlikely rise to prime minister ("As in Grantham, Margaret was again living over the shop"); war with the cabinet and the trade unions; solidarity with the United States; conservatism; femininity; glamour; strength; and a brusque and commanding style that put Britain's patriarchy in its place.
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In his more relaxed mode, the writer can (to his great credit) turn a withering critical eye on his own enthusiasms — in his youth, it was "college radio, literary snobbery, the conspiracy of the high and the low against the middlebrow" — reminding you that, as independent as we like to think our taste is, we are all the products of specific cultural moments.
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The ideal Oscar nominee is a kind of high-middlebrow work, a mix of star power and strong writing and gripping storytelling that at its best achieves great artistry (as happened often in the 1970s, less often in other eras) but even if it falls short maintains a certain level of quality joined to broad, dare-one-say populist appeal.
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Taking its cues from such movies as "Hidden Figures" and "Green Book" — with a little "Shawshank Redemption" thrown in with a piquant flourish — "The Banker" is the kind of mainstream, old-fashioned movie that gives middlebrow a good name: It may not be a solid-gold slam-dunk, but it delivers on the audience's investment, with minimum risk and modest interest. PG-13.
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Like this movie, Flynn's books fall into a category you might call anti-middlebrow: packaged as thrillers, written in the knowing pop-cultural cadence of mid-2000s blogs and comprising a disorienting blend of genre influences, they avoid the striving pretensions of bad literary fiction, despite also being fairly dense and containing, sneakily, many of the pleasures of a digressive social novel.
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But he also viewed Kennedy with an easygoing detachment, rather as Kennedy tended to view himself; he laughed along with the affectionate Vaughn Meader impersonations and the Mad magazine spoofs of J.F.K. that I added to his reading of the New York World-Telegram , a middlebrow broadsheet unaware that, along with men's hats and women's cotton gloves, it was on the brink of death.
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In this, it reflects the narrowing of sensibilities and interests of those writing today, something reinforced by the corporate demands of mainstream publishing houses, the astonishing lack of meaningful inclusion in cultural criticism and writing programs, and the emergence of a global elite in the world of Anglophone letters — one that creates the impression of diversity while leaving untouched the supreme reign of the unadventurous middlebrow.
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The Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals have been revived so successfully in the past two decades, in impeccably posh corners like the National Theatre in London and Lincoln Center Theatre here, that it's hard to recall that not so long ago they were considered very déclassé—taken for granted by an earlier generation to have been part of the suburban middlebrow descent of Broadway theatre in the nineteen-fifties, especially when it came to the quality of the music.
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How fitting that this young, cranky English singer-songwriter infamous for dissing corporate pop stars should achieve his big breakthrough not thanks to the critics who declared him our New Dylan (just how many of those do we need?) but via "Simple as This," his song featured on the 2014 soundtrack to The Fault In Our Stars, a truly evil film infinitely more middlebrow than anything the boys in One Direction, the admittedly bland targets of his ire in the press, have ever recorded.
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Her music glossy, twangy, encased in shiny resin, her voice distinctively modest and lucid, like your neighbor just down the street, Clark is as much a middlebrow queen as Kacey Musgraves, whose Pageant Material last year jolted the formal stasis of modern country, and by extension good old-fashioned traditional American values, and by further extension the cutesy feelgood blandness that occupies so throbbing a place in the national heart, by setting those elements against explicitly progressive or at least liberal content in a clever dialectical synthesis.
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And Hobie (basically Jesus), who runs an antiques shop at which Theo finds refuge, is so innocent to the ways of the world that he is slowly bankrupting himself through his devotion to beauty and refusal to sell his furniture to the undeserving, and doesn't even own a TV. Bad: Mr. Barbour, the posh Upper East Side dad with whom Theo briefly lives who likes sailing and Maxfield Parrish (middlebrow); Theo's own dad, who lives in tacky suburban Las Vegas and used to act on TV (lowbrow).
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