Post by profblues on Oct 4, 2015 11:13:43 GMT -5
from the NY Times....
Is snobbery dead?
Before exploring the possible answers — Mais non! Good riddance! Who cares? — we should perhaps define our terms. The word “snob” has a contested etymology and an interestingly tangled set of uses. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (no second-rate sources here; what do you take me for?), it originated in the 18th century as a term for a shoemaker. For much of the 19th century, it was used to refer to persons of “no breeding.” According to the Oxford website, “in time the word came to describe someone with an exaggerated respect for high social position or wealth who looks down on those regarded as socially inferior.” A pretender. A poser. A wannabe. An arriviste.
Urban Dictionary helpfully cites Paris Hilton and the Olsen twins as examples, which may be evidence of how trivial the idea of snobbery has become in 21st-century America. In this country, the meaning that has long dominated has to do less with wealth or station than with taste, and the word’s trajectory has almost completely reversed. Americans are in general a little squeamish about money and class — worshiping one while pretending the other doesn’t exist — and more comfortable with hierarchies and distinctions that seem strictly cultural. A snob over here is someone who looks contemptuously down, convinced above all of his or her elevated powers of discernment.
Of course, we all know people like that. There is a rich tradition, for instance, of film snobbery, or rather of passionate cinephiles being derided as snobs because of their willingness to read subtitles. The film industry does what it can in the autumn months to beckon them back into theaters with promises of “seriousness,” but a true snob will disdain obvious Oscar bait. If, that is, there are any true film snobs left. As subtitled movies grow scarcer on American screens, the traditional signifiers of snobbery grow scarce. Is a film snob someone who name-checks Pedro Costa, Michael Haneke or other international auteurs? Someone who drops the word “auteur” into a discussion of “Mad Max: Fury Road”? A person who admires Kristen Wiig, but only in her serious roles?
You see the problem. “Snob” is a category in which nobody would willingly, or at least unironically, claim membership. Like the related (and similarly complicated) term “hipster,” it’s what you call someone else. What some of my nearest and dearest, I might as well admit, call me. When I wrinkle my nose at a restaurant or roll my eyes at a movie that everyone else seems to be enjoying, the word comes accusatorily tripping off my children’s tongues, and I find myself at pains to explain that they are quite mistaken. A snob is a person who brandishes borrowed notions of distinction, whereas I — by temperament as well as by profession a critic — have devoted much of my life to the disinterested application of true standards of excellence. It’s the very opposite of snobbery. The difference should be self-evident.
Oddly enough, this argument is rarely convincing. And I find myself lately feeling less like a caricature — a prig in an ascot, a fuddy-duddy with a pipe or any of the other amusing types a Google image search will yield — than like a fossil, the last devotee of an obscure and obsolescent creed, or the only participant in an argument that has long since been settled. It seems to be an article of modern democratic faith that disputing taste is taboo: at best a lapse in manners, at worst an offense against feelings or social order (which sometimes seem to amount to the same thing). Our nation is at present riven by social inequality and polarized by ideology, but the last thing anyone wants to be called is an elitist.
That epithet has a political sting that the old one lacked, and “snob” is not wielded as readily as it used to be. Instead of food snobs — or “gourmets,” as they once called themselves — we now have foodies. Literary snobbery died when Jonathan Franzen fell out with Oprah and conquered the best-seller list anyway. The hot narrative art form of the moment, television, is genetically immune to snobbery. For most of modern history, the only way to be a TV snob was not to own a set. (Or maybe to say that you only watched PBS, not that anyone would have believed you.) The arrival of “serious,” “difficult” cable dramas and spiky, insidery comedies has not changed the essentially populist character of the medium. We all have our binge watches, our guilty pleasures, and our relationship to them is less exclusive than evangelical. Television is horizontal rather than hierarchal.
And the flowering of television coincides with the digital transformation of cultural consumption, a great leveling force that turns a forbidding landscape of steep crags and hidden valleys into a sunlit plain of equivalence. The world of the Yelp score, the Amazon algorithm and the Facebook thumb is a place of liking and like-mindedness, of niches and coteries and shared enthusiasms, a Utopian zone in which everyone is a critic and nobody is a snob because nobody’s taste can be better than anyone else’s.
That’s the theory, anyway. But permit me a moment of dissent, even if I risk looking like a reactionary nostalgist. My meditations here are partly inspired by the current New York Film Festival, a lively and venerable annual event whose birth, in 1963, represented the high-water mark of film snobbery in America, both as something to be mocked and something to be proclaimed and celebrated. Opening with Luis Buñuel’s elegantly antibourgeois “The Exterminating Angel,” the first New York Film Festival included work by Ozu and Bresson, Resnais and Polanski. (And also a lot of films by lesser-known directors.) Over the rest of the decade, the festival would become a port of entry for films from Europe and Asia, and also an annual exposition of a vibrant and uncompromisingly — what? There’s no neutral word: Sophisticated? Advanced? Radical? Self-regarding — film culture in New York.
I was not around in those heady days, but I’ve done what I can to overcome that sad accident of birth. I have frequently fled from the vulgar amusements of the multiplex to the comfort of the Criterion Collection. I have savored “Anticipation of La Notte,” Phillip Lopate’s affectionately self-mocking memoir of his undergraduate infatuation with Michelangelo Antonioni and all he represented. I have furrowed my brow over Susan Sontag’s elegiac “A Century of Cinema,” which declared, in 1995, that it was all over, that the ardor and conviction of midcentury movie love would never be matched by later generations.
And I have winced at Pauline Kael’s near-contemporary demolition of the fantasies of the art-house audience in a famous essay of that title, first published in 1961 and reprinted a few years later in “I Lost It at the Movies,” which skewered a certain high-minded, right-thinking sector of the moviegoing public with such force and acuity that I can feel the sting after more than 50 years. “For several decades now,” she began, “educated people have been condescending toward the children, the shopgirls, all those with ‘humdrum’ or ‘impoverished’ lives — the mass audience — who turned to movies for ‘ready-made’ dreams. The educated might admit that they sometimes went to the movies for the infantile mass audience,” she allowed, then added, “but presumably they were not ‘taken in’; they went to get away from the tensions of their complex lives and work. But of course when they really want to enjoy movies as an art, they go to foreign films, or ‘adult’ or unusual or experimental American films.”
No more thorough anatomy of the cultural pretensions of the American liberal elite was ever written, and if anything, Kael’s broadside has the authority of an inside job. She knew these “educated” art-house customers. She had been to their houses, sampled their cooking, surveyed the handsome books on their coffee tables and the tasteful décor of their living rooms. She might even have been mistaken for one of them.
And of course her criticism is unanswerable, because it is predicated on an accusation of bad faith: It seems that her art-house patrons don’t really like what they claim to like; or else they like the right movies for the wrong reasons, seeking affirmation of their prejudices and assumptions rather than real challenges or true pleasures. Such shallowness is the very definition of snobbery, but the title of the essay cuts two ways. It may be a debunking of what certain self-deluding moviegoers think they are doing, but it is also Kael’s own fantasy about what those people, as a class, are really like.
In any case, broadly speaking, Kael’s position has prevailed. Condescension to the mass audience and its pleasures is not cool, or fashionable or politically correct. Populist entertainment sits comfortably alongside more rarefied aesthetic pursuits, not least at the New York Film Festival itself, which routinely makes room for big, awards-hungry Hollywood movies.
All of which is good. But the specter of snobbery still haunts our consumerist paradise. We have so much stuff to choose from, but each of us knows that some of it is more worthwhile than the rest, that there are standards and canons and serious arguments lurking in the pleasant meadows where we graze and browse.
What I’m trying to say is: Yes, fine, I am a snob. I revere the formal achievement of the first and most recent “Mad Max” movies. I sneer at most biopics and costume dramas. I like my pleasures slow and difficult. I would rather watch a mediocre film from South America or Eastern Europe about the sufferings of poor people than a mediocre Hollywood comedy about the inconveniences of the affluent. I look up in admiration at models of artistic perfection, sound judgment and noble achievement, and I look down on what I take to be the stupid, cheap and cynical aspects of public discourse. I sit at my cobbler’s bench and hammer away. If the words nerd and geek can be rehabilitated — if legions of misunderstood enthusiasts can march from the margins of respectability to the heart of the mainstream — then why not snob as well?
Who’s with me? Anyone? I’m really not that picky.
Is snobbery dead?
Before exploring the possible answers — Mais non! Good riddance! Who cares? — we should perhaps define our terms. The word “snob” has a contested etymology and an interestingly tangled set of uses. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (no second-rate sources here; what do you take me for?), it originated in the 18th century as a term for a shoemaker. For much of the 19th century, it was used to refer to persons of “no breeding.” According to the Oxford website, “in time the word came to describe someone with an exaggerated respect for high social position or wealth who looks down on those regarded as socially inferior.” A pretender. A poser. A wannabe. An arriviste.
Urban Dictionary helpfully cites Paris Hilton and the Olsen twins as examples, which may be evidence of how trivial the idea of snobbery has become in 21st-century America. In this country, the meaning that has long dominated has to do less with wealth or station than with taste, and the word’s trajectory has almost completely reversed. Americans are in general a little squeamish about money and class — worshiping one while pretending the other doesn’t exist — and more comfortable with hierarchies and distinctions that seem strictly cultural. A snob over here is someone who looks contemptuously down, convinced above all of his or her elevated powers of discernment.
Of course, we all know people like that. There is a rich tradition, for instance, of film snobbery, or rather of passionate cinephiles being derided as snobs because of their willingness to read subtitles. The film industry does what it can in the autumn months to beckon them back into theaters with promises of “seriousness,” but a true snob will disdain obvious Oscar bait. If, that is, there are any true film snobs left. As subtitled movies grow scarcer on American screens, the traditional signifiers of snobbery grow scarce. Is a film snob someone who name-checks Pedro Costa, Michael Haneke or other international auteurs? Someone who drops the word “auteur” into a discussion of “Mad Max: Fury Road”? A person who admires Kristen Wiig, but only in her serious roles?
You see the problem. “Snob” is a category in which nobody would willingly, or at least unironically, claim membership. Like the related (and similarly complicated) term “hipster,” it’s what you call someone else. What some of my nearest and dearest, I might as well admit, call me. When I wrinkle my nose at a restaurant or roll my eyes at a movie that everyone else seems to be enjoying, the word comes accusatorily tripping off my children’s tongues, and I find myself at pains to explain that they are quite mistaken. A snob is a person who brandishes borrowed notions of distinction, whereas I — by temperament as well as by profession a critic — have devoted much of my life to the disinterested application of true standards of excellence. It’s the very opposite of snobbery. The difference should be self-evident.
Oddly enough, this argument is rarely convincing. And I find myself lately feeling less like a caricature — a prig in an ascot, a fuddy-duddy with a pipe or any of the other amusing types a Google image search will yield — than like a fossil, the last devotee of an obscure and obsolescent creed, or the only participant in an argument that has long since been settled. It seems to be an article of modern democratic faith that disputing taste is taboo: at best a lapse in manners, at worst an offense against feelings or social order (which sometimes seem to amount to the same thing). Our nation is at present riven by social inequality and polarized by ideology, but the last thing anyone wants to be called is an elitist.
That epithet has a political sting that the old one lacked, and “snob” is not wielded as readily as it used to be. Instead of food snobs — or “gourmets,” as they once called themselves — we now have foodies. Literary snobbery died when Jonathan Franzen fell out with Oprah and conquered the best-seller list anyway. The hot narrative art form of the moment, television, is genetically immune to snobbery. For most of modern history, the only way to be a TV snob was not to own a set. (Or maybe to say that you only watched PBS, not that anyone would have believed you.) The arrival of “serious,” “difficult” cable dramas and spiky, insidery comedies has not changed the essentially populist character of the medium. We all have our binge watches, our guilty pleasures, and our relationship to them is less exclusive than evangelical. Television is horizontal rather than hierarchal.
And the flowering of television coincides with the digital transformation of cultural consumption, a great leveling force that turns a forbidding landscape of steep crags and hidden valleys into a sunlit plain of equivalence. The world of the Yelp score, the Amazon algorithm and the Facebook thumb is a place of liking and like-mindedness, of niches and coteries and shared enthusiasms, a Utopian zone in which everyone is a critic and nobody is a snob because nobody’s taste can be better than anyone else’s.
That’s the theory, anyway. But permit me a moment of dissent, even if I risk looking like a reactionary nostalgist. My meditations here are partly inspired by the current New York Film Festival, a lively and venerable annual event whose birth, in 1963, represented the high-water mark of film snobbery in America, both as something to be mocked and something to be proclaimed and celebrated. Opening with Luis Buñuel’s elegantly antibourgeois “The Exterminating Angel,” the first New York Film Festival included work by Ozu and Bresson, Resnais and Polanski. (And also a lot of films by lesser-known directors.) Over the rest of the decade, the festival would become a port of entry for films from Europe and Asia, and also an annual exposition of a vibrant and uncompromisingly — what? There’s no neutral word: Sophisticated? Advanced? Radical? Self-regarding — film culture in New York.
I was not around in those heady days, but I’ve done what I can to overcome that sad accident of birth. I have frequently fled from the vulgar amusements of the multiplex to the comfort of the Criterion Collection. I have savored “Anticipation of La Notte,” Phillip Lopate’s affectionately self-mocking memoir of his undergraduate infatuation with Michelangelo Antonioni and all he represented. I have furrowed my brow over Susan Sontag’s elegiac “A Century of Cinema,” which declared, in 1995, that it was all over, that the ardor and conviction of midcentury movie love would never be matched by later generations.
And I have winced at Pauline Kael’s near-contemporary demolition of the fantasies of the art-house audience in a famous essay of that title, first published in 1961 and reprinted a few years later in “I Lost It at the Movies,” which skewered a certain high-minded, right-thinking sector of the moviegoing public with such force and acuity that I can feel the sting after more than 50 years. “For several decades now,” she began, “educated people have been condescending toward the children, the shopgirls, all those with ‘humdrum’ or ‘impoverished’ lives — the mass audience — who turned to movies for ‘ready-made’ dreams. The educated might admit that they sometimes went to the movies for the infantile mass audience,” she allowed, then added, “but presumably they were not ‘taken in’; they went to get away from the tensions of their complex lives and work. But of course when they really want to enjoy movies as an art, they go to foreign films, or ‘adult’ or unusual or experimental American films.”
No more thorough anatomy of the cultural pretensions of the American liberal elite was ever written, and if anything, Kael’s broadside has the authority of an inside job. She knew these “educated” art-house customers. She had been to their houses, sampled their cooking, surveyed the handsome books on their coffee tables and the tasteful décor of their living rooms. She might even have been mistaken for one of them.
And of course her criticism is unanswerable, because it is predicated on an accusation of bad faith: It seems that her art-house patrons don’t really like what they claim to like; or else they like the right movies for the wrong reasons, seeking affirmation of their prejudices and assumptions rather than real challenges or true pleasures. Such shallowness is the very definition of snobbery, but the title of the essay cuts two ways. It may be a debunking of what certain self-deluding moviegoers think they are doing, but it is also Kael’s own fantasy about what those people, as a class, are really like.
In any case, broadly speaking, Kael’s position has prevailed. Condescension to the mass audience and its pleasures is not cool, or fashionable or politically correct. Populist entertainment sits comfortably alongside more rarefied aesthetic pursuits, not least at the New York Film Festival itself, which routinely makes room for big, awards-hungry Hollywood movies.
All of which is good. But the specter of snobbery still haunts our consumerist paradise. We have so much stuff to choose from, but each of us knows that some of it is more worthwhile than the rest, that there are standards and canons and serious arguments lurking in the pleasant meadows where we graze and browse.
What I’m trying to say is: Yes, fine, I am a snob. I revere the formal achievement of the first and most recent “Mad Max” movies. I sneer at most biopics and costume dramas. I like my pleasures slow and difficult. I would rather watch a mediocre film from South America or Eastern Europe about the sufferings of poor people than a mediocre Hollywood comedy about the inconveniences of the affluent. I look up in admiration at models of artistic perfection, sound judgment and noble achievement, and I look down on what I take to be the stupid, cheap and cynical aspects of public discourse. I sit at my cobbler’s bench and hammer away. If the words nerd and geek can be rehabilitated — if legions of misunderstood enthusiasts can march from the margins of respectability to the heart of the mainstream — then why not snob as well?
Who’s with me? Anyone? I’m really not that picky.
. Mainly for me anyway, working it out for yourself and being open to a wide range of experiences, cultural and otherwise, which doesn't mean you necessarily like everything either. Or something.
