Thoughts on Levine

In the third chapter, “Order, Hierarchy, and Culture” Levine discusses how American audiences at the opera, theater, museum and concert hall became more docile and passive in the late 19^th century. He writes that audiences “had become less interactive, less of a public and more of a group of mute receptors. Art was becoming a one-way process: the artist communicating and the audience receiving” (Levine, 195). He further iterates that the “champions of high culture” trained and taught the audience to receive the performance individually, not collectively (195). Moreover, Levine argues that the audience’s silence deferred authority to the performers and critics, further widening the gulf between the taste arbiters and receivers. Levine thus presents evidence of a decline in the outward physical response to a performance, but this lack of engagement is only one type of reaction. Levine seems to put a lot of emphasis on audience interaction during the performance. I would be curious to know what audiences discussed with each other at the intermission or after the performance. Approval, disapproval, and general impressions of a show communicated in conversation must have taken place. Also, it would be interesting to track down written records of reception among general audiences found in diaries or community bulletins/newspapers. The interaction with a performance doesn’t necessarily end when the curtain goes down. Individuals quietly taking in a show are still formulating ideas, opinions, and reactions to what they’ve witnessed, and once this is shared in a community, consensus opinions are formed. These opinions may or may not influence the content of a future performance, but the audience has a little more agency than Levine credits.

Levine briefly mentions how sports and religion elicited more physical participation from people than those attending for example, a theater performance. Regarding sports he writes, “…it is necessary to look to the athletic arena to find the equivalent of the nineteenth-century audience in which the spectators feel like participants, manifest a sense of immediacy and at times even of control, and articulate their opinions and feelings vocally and unmistakably” (195). The topic of sports in general seems to be absent from a cultural taste investigation. Russell Lynes has taste categories for clothes, furniture, useful objects, entertainment, salad, drinks, reading, sculpture, games, etc. but in his chart and article he never mentions where sports fit in the distinctions between highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow. To go back to Levine, it would be interesting to do the same kind of historical inquiry that he does with the examples of Shakespeare and opera, and focus on the brow attachments to sports. What was lowbrow sport in the 19^th century? What was highbrow? How has it changed (or not) over time? Has audience participation in sports always been active? How has audience etiquette changed? Which sports does this apply to?

Matt Nelson