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JONATHAN MILLER
gobbles up the avant garde even as it is created. The old distances have
collapsed and individual talent, far from being cut off, now has an open
frontier across which the most intimate, immediate ideas are smuggled
into the public domain before they have time to germinate in the
privacy of the old fashioned rejection. As Mary McCarthy brilliantly
indicated in one of her addresses at the Prix Formentor in Salzburg this
year, art has become subordinate to taste, existing only in order
to
be
conspicuously consumed and discussed. And not just conspicuously, con–
sumed but immediately. Art has become a branch of show-biz and not
just in style but in content too. The gap between painting and perform–
ance has narrowed and the drama of the absurd has become a depart–
ment of the painting of the ridiculous. Part of the enormous success of
Rauschenberg here in London a few months ago was due not so much to
conditioning by other paintings in the same style as by the acoustic pop–
dada of the radio Goon show which also played tricks and jokes with
replicas of reality. Even politics has been telescoped into this community
and since the gigantic success of TW-3 parliament has become a script–
writing subsidiary of BBC-TV. The line between "happenings" and simple
occurrences has been rubbed out. England has become one vast happen–
ing covered by the popular press rather in the same way as Variety
covers B'way and the Pix. In fact far from being the "queer ladder,"
conspicuous performance of almost any sort has become a bloody great
staircase to the top.
And so it goes on. Must stop now. Hoping this finds you as it
leaves me,
Jonathan Miller
