While the decades since have seen titanic growth in middlebrow art across all media, there has been little change in this default impression of ‘middlebrow’ as a term somewhere between a literary expression of dismissal, and an outright slur. Although the ‘lowbrow’ has, in recent years, been reclaimed as a legitimate aesthetic domain, the middlebrow continues to be a denigrated and troublesome category. The highbrow has its defenders (snobs) and the lowbrow its defenders (hipsters), but it is not easy to find defenders of the middlebrow. Middlebrow is a term of appraisal that admits not just of bad, but good, even brilliant, instances. To do so, however, we must first take up the question of what the middlebrow is.