In February 1949, Harper’s published the essay “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” by its managing editor, Russell Lynes. There, he observed a new structure determining prestige in the country: where once wealth and family were the markers of status, now taste and intelligence—what Pierre Bourdieu would later call cultural capital—were paramount. Two months later Life magazine had illustrator Tom Funk convert the essay into a chart of eleven columns and four rows, cataloging everyday tastes across Lynes’s classes. Five years later, Lynes would greatly expand on the essay and reprint Funk’s chart alongside it in his classic book The Tastemakers.
This weekend, gripped by some sort of madness, I decided it was time to update the chart for the present day. It’s a bit fraught—perhaps even disingenuous—to have done so as the very premise of the original book has been upended. Where in Lynes’s day, wealth masqueraded as taste, conspicuous consumption has become important again even as tastemakers have declined in influence. I suspect this has to do with the rise of hip-hop in the 1990s and its relentless valorization of bling, but it is also very much the product of a certain crass vulgarity in new centers of wealth such as Los Angeles, China, and the Emirates where luxury fashion, supercars, and extreme plastic surgery mark off class.
But such displays of wealth would be frowned on in many circles. Rather than replacing Lynes’s model, we have a Lyotardian condition of taste discourses that are mutually incommensurable but sometimes cross over oddly. After all, artist James Turrell (formerly highbrow, although by the start of the 2010s, no more than upper middlebrow) designed an installation for Kanye West (lowbrow) on the unhinged rapper’s Wyoming ranch. Lynes’s hierarchy has not been replaced so much as demoted to one among many.
Since, like the pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing Lynes, I am inevitably biased, I turned to Anthropic’s Claude for the update. After all, it would unemotionally predict the best statistical fit for any cell in the chart, and so it did. One can’t trust one’s instincts too much in this game. The deepest change that Claude identified is that for Lynes, the great division was between the highbrow and everyone below; now it is a line through the middle. The upper middlebrow still receives its taste from institutions—museums, critics, prestige media—while the lower middlebrow receives it from online algorithms: rankings, review scores, and recommendation engines. BookTok inherits the role of the Book-of-the-Month Club. And the chart puts conspicuous consumption in its place: price does not correlate with taste. Upper middlebrow—the least confident of the social strata—spends the most, the highbrow aesthete drinks a ten-dollar bottle of sherry, not a ninety-dollar Caymus, and the crypto bro in head-to-toe Balenciaga reads on the chart as exactly what he is—the lodge brother with a nine-figure wallet. Overall, Funk’s categories held up almost intact—salads still sort the classes—but Records had to become Music, though the LP has come back—often as object rather than medium.
Note also the telephone: in 1949 the Bell System owned all telephones, eliminating choice and class status. Today, the Apple and Android stores create the duopoly again and ensure that everyone carries the same thing again, with self-expression available only in the attached plastic bits.
Now a large language model is, by construction, a machine for locating the statistical center of taste, which is close enough to the definition of the middlebrow. Left to itself, Claude drifted toward the defensible middle of every judgment, and I did have to overrule it in some places (I’ll let you decide where). Still, in 1949 it took the middlebrow Life magazine to turn the highbrow critic’s essay into a chart; in 2026 it takes the statistical machine to do the sorting and a biased critic to drag the cells off the mean. The division of labor between judgment and distribution turns out to be the one structure in The Tastemakers that has survived wholly intact.
Click here for a full size view from my slightly sketchy private server.