Modernism and the Middlebrow

Christopher Reed

As the program for this conference notes, modernity looks to us today to have its ugly aspects. For the modernists themselves, canons of modern beauty were created against their own categories of modern ugliness. Among these, none was more pernicious than the "middlebrow." This talk takes up the ugliness of modernism's key concepts derived from military theory in the age of imperial conquest ― terms like "avant-garde" and "movements" ― and juxtaposes them to the reparative qualities of middlebrow initiatives that used art by Japanese and Japanese-American artists to address the legacy of war in the 1950s and 60s. 

Speaker

Christopher Reed is Distinguished Professor of English and Visual Culture at the Pennsylvania State University, where he directs the interdisciplinary PhD program in Visual Studies. For the academic year 2022-23, he is serving as the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at Oxford University. Reed’s scholarship and teaching engage with a wide range of art and design with an eye to the social significance of visual expression and experience.  His books include the award-winning Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities (2017), Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (2011), the co-authored If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (2012), Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (2004), and the anthology Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (1996).