612
DWIGHT MACDONALD
Its significance was that it simply refused to compete in the
established cultural marketplaces. It made a desperate effort
to fence off some area within which the serious artist could
still function, to erect again the barriers between the
cOgMs–
centi
and the
ignoscenti
that had been
bre~hed
by the
rise
of
Masscult. The attempt was absurd, according to some modem
ideas, since it was against the whole movement of history; and
our cultural sociologists, had they been anachronistically con–
sulted by Yeats or Stravinsky, could have proved to them with
irrefutable tables and research studies that it could not possibly
come to anything. For it was, sociologically speaking, unrealistic.
Nevertheless, the attempt did in fact succeed, perhaps because
artists, writers and musicians are not very good at statistics,
and to it we owe most of the major creations of the last seventy
years.
The old avant-garde has passed and left no successors.
We continue to live off its capital but the community has
broken up and the standards are no longer respected. The
crisis in America
is
especially severe. Our creators are too
isolated or too integrated. Most of them merge gracefully into
Midcult, feeling they must be part of "the life of our
time,"
whatever that means (I should think it would be ambitious
enough to
try
to be part of one's own life), and fearful of being
accused of snobbishness, cliqueism, negativism or, worst of all,
practising
"art
for art's sake" (though for what better sake?).
Some revolt, but their work tends toward eccentricity since it
lacks contact with the past and doesn't get support from a
broad enough intelligentsia in the present. The two currently
most prominent groups, the "action painters" and the
beatnik
academy of letters, differ from the old avant-garde in two
interesting ways. They are cut off from tradition: the works
of Joyce and Picasso, for instance, show an extraordinary
knowledge of (and feeling for) the achievements of the past,
while those of Jack Kerouac and Clifford Still, for instance; do
not. And they have had too much publicity too soon; the
