wiki lowbrow / highbrow

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Aesthetic standards of low culture stress substance, form being totally subservient, and there is no explicit concern with abstract ideas or even with fictional forms of contemporary social problems and issues.
  • preference for action and melodrama
  • world divided into heroes and villains
  • sexual segregation
  • male action drama - fight against crime, saving society from a natural disaster (clear issues)
  • hero is sure of his maculinity, shy with "good" women and sexually aggressive with "bad" ones.
  • confessional magazine - conflict between being sexually responsive in order to be popular with men and remaining virginal until marriage.
— Herbert Gans

All cultural products (especially high culture) have a certain demographic to which they appeal most. Low culture appeals to very simple and basic human needs plus offers a perceived return to innocence, the escape from real world problems, or the experience of living vicariously through viewing someone else’s life on television.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_culture#Standards_and_definitions_of_low_culture

Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, "highbrow" is synonymous with intellectual; as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture.

Prince Hamlet was considered by Virginia Woolf as a highbrow lacking orientation in the world once he had lost the lowbrow Ophelia with her grip on earthly realities: this, she thought, explained why in general highbrows "honour so wholeheartedly and depend so completely upon those who are called lowbrows".

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