No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture

by Andrew Ross

The intellectual and the popular: Irving Howe and John Waters, Susan Sontag and Ethel Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald and Bill Cosby, Amiri Baraka and Mick Jagger, Andrea Dworkin and Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and Lenny Bruce. All feature in Andrew Ross's lively history and critique of modern American culture. Andrew Ross examines how and why the cultural authority of modern intellectuals is bound up with the changing face of popular taste in America. He argues that the making of "taste" is hardly an aesthetic activity, but rather an exercise in cultural power, policing and carefully redefining social relations between classes.

Genres: Nonfiction, Cultural Studies, Pop Culture

292 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 1989

About the author

Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a social activist. A contributor to The Nation, the Village Voice, New York Times, and Artforum, he is the author of many books, including, most recently, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City and Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times.

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

A theoretical introduction to camp (and its valence in queer communities), and a significant examination of popular culture and "taste". Ross, far too predictably, focuses a bit too much on white, upper/middle class gay men, but fortunately the book's usefulness extends beyond these limitations.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Andrew Ross's book on intellectuals and popular culture is very messy. An example of a book with lots of good ideas, and haphazard scholarship, so ultimately a settler-scholar can feel a little put-out by the pioneer's having clear-cut the town before the environmental impact was measured. And Ross may not like the analogy, but then I don't think his book is going to have converted many to the cosmopolitan magistracy of its author's arguments. I see it rather as the 1989-published footnote to Joshua Clover's 1989, which didn't come out until almost twenty years subsequent. I recently re-read the chapter on camp, for its argument (which I remembered, something to be said for that) that camp "licensed" Sixties counter-culture. An unpersuasive argument in the details that has an uncanny rightness to it. The book's like that.

[Judith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was pretty good, it was just kind of outdated // 3,5 stars