While reading selections of Levine’s text, I was struck by how often American culture was compared with European culture, both positively and negatively. As a new nation, America would naturally compare itself with its ancestral land, but none of these comparisons seemed to take into account America’s unique nature as a nation of immigrants – both upper and lower class. As such, its tastes and art would naturally be as heterogeneous as its people. In his comparison of opera and American musical theater, Gerald Nachman surmised that “If operas originally had been written by Americans…’they’d be dismissed as moronic,’” noting that “it must be the American reverence for all things European and our tendency to take for granted all things quintessentially American” (Levine 1). This brief anecdote in Levine’s prologue begins his observations regarding the 19^th- and early 20^th-century American search for an individual culture that he discusses in more depth throughout his third chapter. This search, I believe, was dramatically hindered by the highbrow elite’s determination to diminish the lower class’s effect on culture and promote the European high culture they deemed worthy. Levine notes the The Outlook’s alarm at America’s changing culture in 1893: “We are in danger of exalting the average man, and rejoicing in…mediocrity” (216). Together with Brander Matthews’ opinions on Mark Twain, who he deemed as “a professional humorist…a writer whose sole duty it was to make us laugh, and to whom therefore we need never give a second thought after the smile had faded from our faces” (212), Levine does a good job showing how dismissive the anointed “arbiters of culture” were of every art that did not meet their predetermined set of European values.

Matthews’ dismissive attitude on Twain made me begin to wonder about which modern-day “lowbrow” artists might one day become classified as “highbrow.” Where does a film like James Cameron’s Avatar fit? Presumably, it would be placed as lowbrow, but its recent win of “Best Motion Picture – Drama” at the Golden Globes (often a precursor to an Oscar win) makes me wonder if maybe one day it might be considered highbrow. Could Avatar’s revolutionary visual effects and unsubstantial story be to us what Twain’s humor was to Matthews?