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ROBERT BRUSTEIN
Robert Brustein
I am interested in the argument you advance but I am not
certain you formulate it correctly. Your statement strikes me as rather
defensive - an uneasy probe into the criticism being directed toward
certain intellectual journals (including your own) which may have
grown too infatuated with the fashionable media-oriented high jinks of
the sixties. I admit to being one of those in opposition to such tenden–
cies, but I don't recognize myself in your characterization. Indeed, it
may well be that the very terms you use to describe the situation are
part of the problem, and suggest a continuing misunderstanding of it.
For example, it seems likely that words like "radicalism" and "conserva–
tism," "orthodox" and "unorthodox," are no longer appropriate to dis–
cussions of modern culture. Originally borrowed from the language of
politics and religion, these terms have by now become so freighted with
extra-aesthetic meanings as to retain value, in such dialogues as this
one, only as a form of invective. They reflect the growing ideological
character of criticism in the sixties, a character which developed partly
in response to the dwindling options of American politics. This fact was
real, and the ideological response was honorably motivated. Still, at the
same time that our society was becoming politically closed, it was bust–
ing wide open culturally. As a result, it is sentimental to assume that
a cultural "radical" can claim quite the same assumptions, frustrations
and apocalyptic vocabulary as a radical in politics.
It should now be sufficiently obvious that the avant-garde move–
ment in America no longer exists in its previous form, and that what
passes for "unorthodox" or "radical" culture today is often an exten–
sion of Madison Avenue - which is to say, of marketing. "There is a
marked suspicion," you write, "of any deviation from the accepted no–
tions of seriousness, as there is of any departure from the orthodox ver–
sion of the mainstream." What mainstream? one is obliged to ask. What
orthodoxy? What accepted notions of seriousness? The image you con–
jure up here of an embattled group of minority artists trying to sur–
vive in the face of a philistine public and a reactionary critical estab–
lishment is simply unrecognizable in the seventies: it belongs to the
twenties. Today, we have a public supine before every cultural novelty,
and an army of intellectual critics · laboring on behalf of "innovation"
side by side with television commentators and the cultural reviewers for
the newspapers and mass magazines. In the face of such an alliance, it
becomes virtually impossible to identify a "mainstream"; unorthodoxy
becomes the new orthodo·xy, and fashion the arbiter of taste. What
deviations from "accepted notions of seriousness" have been stamped
out by' hostile "conservative" critics? The Beatles? Camp? Andy Warhol?
Abbie Hoffman? Mailer's movies or journalism? Performance groups?
Guerrilla theater? Grotowski? Jean-Luc Godard? Minimal art? John
Cage? Each is dutifully tintyped in
Newsweek
and
Time,
interviewed
on the Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin shows and analyzed in depth by
serious critics in the pages of intellectual journals. No, the danger today
is not from a "marked suspicion" of the unorthodox, but from too ready
an acceptance of it. The emblematic avant-garde figur.e is no longer the
expatriate artist, starving and unrecognized in his Paris garret, but rather
