Jacques Barzun
ARTIST AGAINST SOCIETY:
SOME ARTICLES OF WAR*
There are at least three reasons why, in spite of all that
has been said and written on the subject, we must keep discussing
the question of Artist and Society, especially in the United States.
One reason is that from all sides, in all the
arts,
government support is
being clamored for. A second is that industrial society (whether
capitalist or socialist) is, or is said to be, inimical to the production
of great art. The third is that the characteristic art of our century–
so-called modem art-is, or is said to be peculiarly obscure and
charmless-hence
insupp.ortable
as well as unrepresentative.
And then there is the outward reason arising from all of these,
which is that hardly a week passes without some explicit complaint
being uttered about the present situation of the arts. The observer
soon finds that this miscellaneous literature of protest makes use of
set terms, and appeals with the aid of historical platitudes to well–
rehearsed feelings about art and social life. In short, an established
public opinion exists on the subject, corresponding to emotions whose
importance is quite simply that they affect the people most closely
concerned with art.
In a time of self-conscious and self-righteous purposes, it is
perhaps inevitable that we should try to fill the gap between hope
and fulfillment by means of cliches, comparisons, and complaints.
But it may also be true that part of the despair is due to our circling
around among ill-considered notions which arouse contradictory feel–
ings and leave us dissatisfied as well as exhausted. We start, for
example, with the axiom that art, in and of itself, is a good thing.
Not necessarily true but-agreed. Then we are reminded that art is a
*This essay is drawn from the Northwestern University Centennial Lecture
delivered by the author at Evanston, Illinois, on April 16, 1951.
