Points After ...
CONSERVATIVE CHIC
In commenting on Tom Wolfe's jazzy piece on the art scene in a
recent
Harper 's,
I am disregarding the advice of my friends who insist you
can't reply to a vaudeville act. All you can do , everyone said , is to characterize
it , to treat it as a phenomenon.
True enough, one really can't reply to Wolfe's arguments, because they
are not arguments but petulant and "clever" assertions so distorting and
oversimplifying that they depend on the ignorance of his readers to be able to
swallow them. And the prose, ah the prose, sounds not as though it came from
a typewriter but had been blown through a clarinet, with its trills and frills,
strutting and playing cute, tickling and cajoling the innocent reader.
But Wolfe does represent a new kind of mindlessness , and so far as I can
make out, he does have some influence on that mass of half-educated people
who busy themselves more and more with art and culture in this country , and
are always in step with the latest trends. Now it is no secret that there is a new
political conservatism in the air . But it is not so clear that it is accompanied by
a parallel conservatism in the arts, where it is deceptively bouncy and
free-wheeling and far out-and very democratic. The fact is , however, that in
this country conservatism in the arts has often taken a populist, folksy,
"realistic " form . And this is what Wolfe plays on, as he panders to the lowest
common denominators of taste and the general dislike of abstract art which is
associated with snobbish, anti-humanist attitudes . And because Wolfe
sounds so hip and is connected with something called the new journalism–
that journalist cult of personality that passes for sophistication-because
Wolfe sounds so advanced, it does not occur to most of his admirers that he is
peddling the most ignorant and backward prejudices .
Ofcourse , it is easier today, when people are in a state ofculture shock , to
put over almost any notion as long as it looks new, pulls down established
authority , and is able to go public. The kaleidoscope of movements, styles,
and half-baked theories, in art and politics, has left most people dizzy and
open both to anything novel and to the simultaneous debunking of it . So
