HILTON KRAMER
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the sheerest nonsense, of course. The culture of modernism is
triumphantly installed in all the institutions that preside over
our cultural affairs-in the universities, in the museums, and in
the mass media.
It
is sponsored by the Federal government
through the Endowment agencies. It is sponsored by the state
through the New York State Council on the Arts. Yet, like the
term "New York Intellectual ," the concept of the avant-garde is
difficult to give up. By holding on to it, we continue to postpone
the day of reckoning-the day when we must face the fact that
modernism is no longer a challenge to our culture but is, indeed,
the sum and substance of our culture today, and face the
question of whether it is any longer adequate for the role it is
asked to fill in our lives. We hold on to this concept of the avant–
garde for the same reason that the commissars in the Kremlin
hold on to the notion that they are "revolutionaries": it creates
the illusion of flux, of historical momentum, of heading toward
some ideal goal, of contending with weighty opponents, with–
out obliging us to acknowledge that
we
are now the custodians
of what this movement promised us, without obliging us to
acknowledge that
we
are the establishment representing its
values. There is something comical in this evasion, and some–
thing tragic too, but for the moment, at least, it aids the tasks of
practical criticism in the arts, for we, as custodians and adminis–
trators of the culture of modernism for the rest of the country, are
well-placed to elucidate its remaining mysteries, such as they
are.
The old "New York Intellectual, " as defined by the old
Partisan Review,
represented a conjunction of two primary
interests-the culture of modernism, and the politics of the anti–
Stalinist Left. The first of these interests is now, as I say, the
common possession of our established public culture. And so the
"New York Intellectual" can be said, I suppose, to have led the
way to the establishment of a new mainstream for the national
culture. But in the second of these interests, the politics of the
anti-Stalinist Left, it lost its nerve in the 1960s, and has been in
conspicuous disarray ever since. The truth is, it was only on the
question of Stalinism that the "New York Intellectual," as here
defined, ever showed any political wisdom whatever. About the
