Curator Magazine has this excerpt from Franklin Einspruch on excellence in the arts & middlebrow taste...
So I have worked out a pragmatic answer: Excellence is art’s reproductive drive. Excellent traits in art trigger the feelings, emotions, and attentions of the viewer. Thus aroused, an artist sets out to reproduce those traits in a new arrangement of materials. Thus the cycle begins anew. It’s not subjective or objective because it’s dynamic……
We don’t use the term “middle art,” and in my opinion there is no middle art. There doesn’t have to be, with so much overlap between high and low. There is, however, middlebrow taste. Middlebrow taste is a kind of chickening out of taste, in which you settle for familiarity instead of demanding excellence……
Go high, go low, but demand it. Whatever you do, don’t chicken out.
Read the rest: High and Low: What is Excellence in the Arts?