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"People still use words like 'middlebrow' and 'kitsch' as terms of disapprobation, even if they don't remember the Marxist tree from which those apples long ago fell. This is because aesthetic preferences are always tied up with anxieties about social status. I can't help judging you by the novel you're reading on the plane or the wallpaper in your house. (You have wallpaper?) If we had no social invidiousness, we would probably have no art — or, at least, we would have a very different economy of art. People like to debate the merits of what they read and see and hear, and to pretend to think ill of those who differ. It's part of the game. The college freshman who declares herself a relativist in philosophy class by day will argue all night about whether Band X is better than Band Y."

— from "Browbeaten: Dwight Macdonald's war on Midcult" by Louis Menand, from the Sept. 5, 2011 New Yorker
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