Highbrow vs. lowbrow

From The New Republic: "For much of modern history, taste has been a lever to delineate 'good' from 'bad,'high society from low. The ability to identify socially appropriate choices in classical literature, architecture and music, and to measure human behavior against … has provided the elite with means by which to distinguish 'us' from 'them.' The terms highbrow and lowbrow, first used in 1902, take their name from the pseudoscience of phrenology — the larger the brow, the larger the brain. A 1949 spread in Life lay out a chart including ballet (highbrow), theater (upper-middlebrow), front-yard sculpture (lower middlebrow), and coleslaw (lowbrow)."