At midcentury, "important" and "influential" culture was whatever the gatekeeper class said it was. Culture consumers seeking status and demonstrable sophistication slogged through anything the gatekeepers pointed to, from atonal music to the French new novel to eventless drama to flatness in painting, just to know the stuff and be able to talk about it. Pleasure was beside the point.

Critics, curators, programmers, academics, etc., enjoyed enormous power to confer stature and significance on any given work because there was a middlebrow consensus that there was a status cost in not keeping up. But the middlebrow audience that once empowered gatekeepers with such high regard has shrunk. Many of the cultural activities that once had mainstream significance--literary fiction is a famous example--are increasingly marginalized. Nanook of the North retains its stature, but outside the subcultures surrounding documentary or silent films, there's no longer any status cost in knowing nothing about the film, and fewer people bother with it.