ABSTRACT
Mass art is art that is designed to be consumed by lots and lots of people. That is why it is produced on such a large scale and distributed by mass technologies. Vaudeville, as practised in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theatres, was a popular art, but not yet a mass art, because the vaudeville performer could only play before one audience of limited size, in one playhouse at a time. Avant-garde art is esoteric; mass art is exoteric. Mass art is meant to command a mass audience. Insofar as mass artworks are formulaic, they are easy to follow, that is., they accord with the expectations. Mass art is easy, especially when compared to the difficulty— perhaps the self-imposed difficulty— of avant-garde art. Moreover, though accessibility is a good-making feature of such a work qua mass art, it does not even entail that a candidate is good in any unqualified way as a mass artwork.
