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Excuse me, gentlemen.
I know a little bit about this sport ball of which you speak.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, what makes art highbrow or lowbrow?
The vase with flowers is art.
The portrait of this young woman is art,
but what the hell is that blotch of red?
Steven, we have an email from Anya Levitov.
Okay.
Dear Angela and Steven,
why is it that in the US for a writer, a journalist,
a university professor,
or any other person of high standing in academia,
it is okay to say, quote,
I don't understand and don't like opera
while in other places, Russia, France, Italy, et cetera,
that would be interpreted as a sign of ignorance.
And it would be quite an unacceptable statement
for a public intellectual.
And not just opera,
appreciating most forms of art, ballet,
classical and jazz music, theater, independent cinema,
is a basic requirement for being an intellectual.
It would also not be considered acceptable
to say that one loves junk food or reads vampire novels.
Parentheses, please send Steven Levit my regards.
We should say Steve Levit is an avowed fan of vampire.
What were those famous books called?
Oh, Twilight?
Twilight, there you go.
You love them as well, right?
I didn't know Levit loved Twilight.
The two of you can have a Twilight book club.
I have to say more about that,
but let me just read the last sentence of Anya's email.
So why in the US are various forms of refined
or acquired tastes considered as a preference?
And in most European countries,
having these acquired tastes is a basic requirement
for joining the intellectual elite.
Thank you very much, regards, Anya Levitov.
It's a really interesting question,
especially considering that not only does my longtime
Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levit,
yes, likes junk food, yes, likes vampire novels,
no, does not like museums.
Or opera.
Or ballet or any of those things.
But I would say that you fall maybe a little bit more
on the Levit side than on the Levitov side, yes?
I read the Twilight series in a week, Steven,
and I hold I think four all-nighters.
I remember being in the train station in Philadelphia,
which is called 30th Street Station.
And I remember it was like being a drug addict.
I was like frantically hunting through the Hudson News racks.
And I was like, oh my God, they have to have new moon.
They don't have new moon.
I mean, Amazon can't get it here until tomorrow.
I need it right now.
So yes, I loved that series.
I've read it more than once.
By the way, I want to ask Levit
if he's Team Edward or Team Jacob.
I have heard those phrases.
You don't even know what I'm talking about.
Holy schmoly.
I'm making note to myself right now.
Find out Team Edward and Team Who?
Team Randolph?
Team Edward, which is my team.
And then Team Jacob.
I think Levit's the Team Edward.
We'll have to figure that out.
So it's an interesting question that Anya asks.
Let's just state the obvious.
The United States, even though it has deep European roots,
is very different from most European countries
in many significant ways.
We did a Freakonomics radio series.
We called it American Culture,
but it was broader than that.
The first episode was literally called
The U.S. Is Just Different,
so let's stop pretending we're not.
The inspiration for that series was the fact that
when we're talking about policy improvements,
whether social policies, healthcare, education,
so often there will be researchers,
such as yourself or economists or others,
who say, hey, here's a system that works really well
in Norway or Denmark or Sweden.
And our instinct is to say,
it's amazing that it works so well there.
Let's bring it over here.
Let's import it.
Exactly.
So I came to ask myself over and over again,
why can't we do that?
And the conclusion that we reached over time
after talking to a lot of different people
across cultural psychologists named Michelle Gelfand.
Yeah, she's great.
But also economists and cultural scholars and so on.
The conclusion that we came to is that, yeah,
we're really different on a lot of levels culturally,
but it extends to politics and policing.
Our media is much more negative
than just about any other country.
Our capitalism is different.
And so it can be really hard to just slap
some effective policy from Scandinavia onto our culture.
So that's a kind of large answer to Anya's question
about why aren't things here the way I would expect them
to be in Russia, France, and Italy and so on.
But to answer her question,
why is it acceptable to ignore these higher forms of art?
By the way, most of the forms of art she named,
opera, ballet, classical music,
they also have deep roots in Europe.
I would say that many people who do think of themselves
in this country as public intellectuals
don't ignore these art forms.
Danny Kahneman's a big ballet fan, by the way.
Now again, not insignificant that he's older
and he's got European roots.
Gore up in what, France and Israel.
Exactly.
But you know, my argument would be that
for the median American,
these forms of art that Anya's talking about
are largely ignored.
I'm not making a judgment here.
You know, the example she raised of Steve Leve
and Angela Duckworth,
you are esteemed professors at renowned universities
and you can embrace vampire novels without shame.
Not a molecule of shame.
Love Actually, your favorite movie.
Oh, come on, now we're not talking about Loebro.
Ah, excuse me.
I will fully admit that Twilight has a feeling
of like mass media, but Love Actually,
I mean, that's middle brow at least.
And what makes something highbrow?
Why is it that opera is highbrow?
Why is it that pop music, Taylor Swift, Adele,
why is that not highbrow?
When I was a much younger person,
I used to ask that very same question
because I grew up in a household
where we paid a lot of attention
to some of those forms of art.
My mom was a ballerina before she got married.
That is very cool, by the way.
So she knew a lot about not only ballet,
but also the classical music that ballet is often set to.
So yeah, I grew up in a home where there was,
I would say, a relatively high appreciation of those forms,
although not visual arts.
My wife grew up in a home in New York City
where they loved opera, ballet, theater,
but also very, very much the visual arts.
When she was growing up in the city,
she went to the Museum of Modern Art
probably once a week with her dad.
But when I was much younger,
I did think what you had asked,
which is what makes it highbrow?
My kind of naive answer was,
well, it's highbrow and very few people like it.
I think that's not a bad answer, not a lot of people,
and also people who are generally at the higher end
of the educational, I hesitate to say socioeconomic
because I think we know a lot of vulgar billionaires.
And similarly, I've known a lot of people
who are in a lower income strata,
who are absolutely entranced with visual arts
and opera and ballet and so on.
It's a different thing if you're also talking
about going to see these things live
because they happen to be extremely expensive.
I mean, an opera ticket in New York City
is gonna cost you probably 150 to $500.
But in terms of what makes something highbrow or lowbrow,
this is not gonna be quite fair,
but I would say that those who love
and embrace highbrow art forms are pretty good
at making their realm feel exclusive.
The art world does an amazingly good job
of establishing these boundaries
through which only a select few types
of tastemakers are allowed.
And so, yeah, I would say there's a certain amount
of pretension, exclusion.
Like a barrier to entry, maybe,
if you wanna take a less cynical view of it.
It's that it's not accessible to like an eight-year-old
because you must acquire some skill or knowledge
in order to appreciate said art form.
Exactly.
Let me just ask you about your preferences.
In the last, let's say, five years,
since we just went through a couple years of pandemic
where nobody went out much,
how many times a year would you say you go to attend
or even just listen intensely to classical music
or go see ballet or opera?
How many times a year, roughly?
Okay, opera, zero, classical music, probably close to zero.
But my husband, Jason, played viola all through college
and he does have an appreciation for classical music,
but I have to laugh because on the rare occasions
on which Jason has dragged me to,
so this is the thing, I always call it a show.
He's like, we don't call it a show.
I don't even remember what the word is,
but you don't call it a show somehow.
When Jason says something like that to you
that sounds in your rendering just now,
like it could be construed as slightly judgy.
How do you respond to that?
How does that make you feel?
We have previously discussed how I seem to not
be able to express or feel embarrassment.
I don't feel even a blush of embarrassment
for not knowing whatever you're supposed to call
a classical music performance, I guess you call them.
I used to always also confuse a symphony with an orchestra.
He was like, the orchestra is the collection of musicians
that plays a symphony.
Now, when he corrects you, does that make you more
or less likely to want to attend a performance?
Probably a neutral effect, Steven.
I'm not like, ooh, I guess I should become more sophisticated
and start to learn all of this lingo, nor does it dissuade me.
I do have to say that sitting there in those plush seats,
I'm always like, oh my God,
are there literally four movements?
Jesus Christ, so long.
There are no words.
So what really needs to happen for Angela to love
attending a classical music performance
would be to simultaneously screen subtitles
that are actually the text from your vampire novels.
Yes, which I guess sounds like opera.
Is that what opera is?
It's like classical music with words.
Maybe you are a closet opera fan.
You just don't even know it yet.
I had a friend years ago, she gave me a starter CD
for the neophyte, for the uninitiated, like try this,
and then we'll work you up to more sophisticated
and difficult operas.
And I do remember playing it at least once
and thinking, I guess this isn't bad,
but I didn't start an opera habit.
I do think that maybe the thing
about these highbrow pleasures,
it's that there is a barrier to entry.
There is a kind of investment that you have to make.
It's not like sugar, which just tastes good untutored.
You don't have to tell a two-year-old to like sugar.
It makes me think of something
which is another huge part of our culture
that is roundly ignored among many public intellectuals.
And what I'm talking about now is sports.
I think back to this really interesting conversation I had
with a professor of complet and German studies
at the University of Michigan.
Her name is Silke-Marie Wienich, and she is German.
And her partner is English, I believe, Stefan Szymanski,
and he is a sports economist.
They ended up collaborating on a book about sports
in Detroit, since they both live in Michigan
and teach at the University of Michigan.
And she admitted that she knew very little
and cared even less about sports generally.
I was interviewing her about a really interesting set
of research she had done having to do with the archives
of the Ford Motor Company.
She discovered this correspondence
that betrayed a deep racial discrimination
within the Ford company against a boxer named Joe Louis,
who is at one point maybe the most famous person in America.
Yeah, I was gonna say the famous Joe Louis, right?
He was a huge, huge icon.
He was black, he grew up in the American South,
lived in Detroit, became a huge champion there.
One of the boxers he beat was Max Schmeling,
who was a representative of Nazi Germany.
But I was talking to Weynach about how it was
that she came to write about this
when she didn't care about sports at all.
And she said, sport is the biggest
global cultural practice.
I'll read you a quick quote from her.
We in cultural studies, I think,
have neglected it at our peril.
And I thought that was really interesting.
Because it's lowbrow?
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
If you know a lot about sports and care about it,
you can bring all sorts of high-level interpretation
and meaning.
I've grown up liking sports,
and I get a lot of pleasure from it.
And I find it very interesting on a lot of levels,
but I can also 100% identify with someone
who grows up without sports, and it just looks absurd.
It's grown men and women
in these ridiculously brightly colored clothes,
running around, doing things with balls
that don't seem to make sense, so I totally get it.
And he or she was saying, that's kind of where I was.
I'm glad I came in this back door
because I saw a lot of elements within sport
that were really interesting for a cultural scholar.
It is so interesting to think of sports as being lowbrow,
because by my definition,
there is an investment that you have to make
so that you can actually appreciate this thing.
To me, the investment is pretty sizable.
I'm getting off the plane on Friday.
This is a long flight, cross-country,
Seattle to Philadelphia.
And in the few minutes between landing
and getting all our stuff out of those overhead bins,
there was a conversation that was struck up
between the guy who was sitting next to me
and the guy who was one seat behind him.
And I gotta tell you, within like two or three minutes,
there was such bonemmy, there was such engagement.
They were talking about some team-
them-ball thing.
It was definitely about football.
I can't even reproduce this conversation, Stephen,
because I don't know a thing about football.
I remember exiting and I was thinking,
wow, this might be the force
that can bring this country together again.
These guys, they could have been best friends from college.
I mean, they were so into this conversation,
but the irony of all this is that I was coming from Seattle
where I'd seen Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seahawks,
and given a talk to his team.
Were you tempted to say, excuse me, gentlemen,
I know a little bit about this sport ball of which you speak.
Yes, exactly.
I didn't say that because I actually know how little I know.
Sports has always seemed to me like a kind of highbrow thing.
And by the way-
Well, highbrow in the sense that it's hard.
It's got a language, it's got a vernacular,
it's got a history.
God, these guys were speaking fluent football
and I was like looking for Google Translate.
And I want to say this too, I don't think it's unrelated.
When I met Pete Carroll the first time,
it was now years ago and I remember going to find out
what it was that he was doing as a coach
that from a psychological perspective,
for on grit, like how do you train growth mindset
and so forth, unexpectedly,
he asked me to give a short talk to his players
while I was there in Seattle.
And I remember that I had previously,
the week before given almost the exact talk
at Harvard for a colloquium.
And so I just gave the same thing,
not thinking to myself, well, Harvard faculty,
NFL football players,
like I didn't have time to adjust my talk.
The questions that were asked
and the thoughtfulness of their responses
when it became a dialogue,
you would not be able to tell me
that those football players were any less intelligent
than the Harvard faculty I had seen the week before.
They were just as smart, they were just as sophisticated.
I think what it teaches me is that,
look, there's golf and there's classical music
and there's rap music and there's vampire novels.
I think if you are an outsider
and you don't have the requisite vocabulary
and the embedded knowledge to appreciate things,
then it can look like a smarter thing to do.
And I know that sounds weird,
but I think of sports as something
that I don't really have the intelligence for.
It's just about what you don't know.
I think the part of it that's frustrating
is if it is something that you know
and like and care about,
the way I may know and like and care about both sport
and let's say jazz music,
or you may care about vampire novels
and deep educational empirical research,
there's a frustration when people who are outside of it
dismiss it as something that is not worthy
of their attention, perhaps because,
as you put it, that high barrier to entry,
it's like, this is explicitly not for me.
Therefore,
