Midcult*

WE STOLE THE NAME.

It’s an insult, technically. There was this critic/World-class Hater named Dwight Macdonald and in 1960 he published an essay called “Masscult & Midcult.” It was a lament about how the upper classes were losing the culture war. Mass culture and middle culture were descending like barbarians. Poor people were making art! Soon, he feared, we would wake to a nightmare world where everyone listens to rock music and nobody listens to opera.

The thing is, Masscult and Midcult aren’t equal in their threat. Masscult is bad, but clumsy and obvious and relatively harmless. Midcult though, is really dangerous. It’s trying to trick you. Smart playing dumb, dumb playing smart. Midcult is the devil at the crossroads of high and low culture, obscuring the lines between one and the other.

Clarity has gone extinct since Macdonald wrote his essay. We’re living at the beginning of the end of something, of several intersecting somethings. The middle has been hollowed out. Ideas of “high” and “low” are somehow more meaningless and more weighty than ever as we slink inevitably toward the terminal point. Even still, the questions are variations on the old tunes: What does art look like at the end of the world? What does love look like? What do we look like?

So we stole the name because Midcult* is a magazine that exists in that bardo between high and low. Most of life exists here, too. There is nothing on Earth that is just one thing. People are mostly a million things at once. And their art should be the same.

But also, we stole the name because we thought it sounded cool.

Country of Publication & Year Established

United States

Established in 2025

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