PARTISAN REVIEW
445
ical changes are going to make individuals more creative or less bedev–
illed by antagonistic forces. The politics of art are a politics of frustra–
tion, though no less culturally indispensable on that account.
That there is no radical presence in society seems to give the
conservative an edge in the argument. He can revile the mistakes and
foolishness (romanticism) of those who still hope for more humane
social arrangements and for forms more responsive to actualities, high
and low. But though the radical consciousness is stymied, the events
of the epoch are radical. The values to which the conservative appeals
are inevitably caricatured by those designated to put them into practice.
The cultural conservative wins the argument, but, like' the political
conservative, he repeatedly finds himself betrayed. Hence he is in a
constant state of paranoia. The most he can hope for is that nothing
will happen - that Nixon will not go to China - and that fewer
threats will be uttered.
Andrew Sarris
My reaction to
PR's
"Statement on the New Cultural Con–
servatism" is nothing if not complex. As a spokesman for cinema, the
only major art form born in the twentieth century, I find myself to the
left of the spokesmen for the older arts. As a liberal skeptic on a
publication widely identified with its more radical contributors, I find
myself to the right of a large part of my readership. As a middle-aged
professor, I regard myself (perhaps too pompously and perhaps even
too pessimistically) as the inheritor of a cultural tradition in danger
of decomposition in the muddled minds of the curiously uncurious
young. As a free-lance writer, I see myself (perhaps too romantically)
as an anarchic outsider full of disdain for the corrupt cliques of the
various editorial establishments. Since my own cultural identity is so
beset with paradoxes and incongruities (if not outright contradictions),
I cannot find a stable locus from which to survey the allegedly "grow–
ing conservatism in discussions of what's' happening in the arts... . "
There is one sentence in the Statement with which I most pro–
foundly agree: "Conservatism does not always take the same form in
culture as in politics, nor is the relation usually predictable." I would
go even further: conservatism does not always take the same form in
one art form as in another, nor is the relation usually predictable. Also,
conservatism in the arts is often not so much a political issue between
left and right as it is an informational issue between the specialist in
one subject and the commentator on all. For a long time, journalistic
rhetoric was all onward and upward. Whenever a mass circulation
magazine asked me to do still another article on the so-called avant–
garde cinema, the editor would make it clear that a favorable and pro–
gressive attitude on my part would be desirable. Indeed, the slightest
intimation that I regarded any major portion of the avant-garde cinema
