Pop Culture and Kitsch Criticism

Mass Culture, compiled by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, is the first book that has ever tempted me to apply the reviewer’s cliche, “definitive.” The theoretical, historical, statistical, cultural, anthropological, depth-analytical, polemical, prophetical articles in it on TV, the movies, pulp fiction, advertising art, etc., more than exhaust their subject. I should like to believe that it will now be considered closed for some time to come. “On peut finir avec la sculpture,” Giacometti once said to me. If it is possible to be done with an art—and this is an age when artists keep trying to finish theirs off—it ought likewise to be possible to make an end to talk about comic books and science fables.

I confess that one of the reasons I hope that the wares of the cultural supermarket will now be left for their proper customers is that I find something annoying about the mental cast of those who keep handling the goods while denying...