middlebrow
noun
- term used (often derogatorily) for describe easily accessible art, usually literature, and the people who use the arts to acquire culture and "class" (social prestige)
Wiktionary
adj
Etymology: From middle + brow, by analogy with highbrow and lowbrow. The term first appeared in Punch (1925) and was later used by Virginia Woolf (1930s) in an unsent letter to the New Statesman, published as a chapter in the book The Death of a Moth and Other Essays (1942).
- Neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between.
“What does a Princeton graduate whose old dream it was to write for the New Yorker do when that dream comes true, only to discover that his cherished magazine is no longer the middlebrow arbiter of high culture of his imagining, but just another media outlet frantic for its market share of mass culture?”
“As in so many middlebrow period dramas, the vintage cars are too shiny, the clothes too smart, the upper-class accents too strained and the dialogue too contrived. However dark the plot becomes, the sun keeps shining brightly through the trees.”
noun
Etymology: From middle + brow, by analogy with highbrow and lowbrow. The term first appeared in Punch (1925) and was later used by Virginia Woolf (1930s) in an unsent letter to the New Statesman, published as a chapter in the book The Death of a Moth and Other Essays (1942).
- A person or thing that is neither highbrow nor lowbrow, but in between.