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translated into English in 1927, in which Ortega argued that
unpopular art is not understood by the masses and is basically
an art for artists. By "artists" he meant people with artistic
sensibility, training, and judgment, not simply people who
create art. He also argued that popular art is romantic art as was
the art of the nineteenth century, which he regarded as a debased
period in art. Oscar Wilde put the position more epigrammati–
cally when he said "Art should never try to be popular-the
public should try to be artistic."
In
recent years this view has been attacked as a form of
elitism and though the opposing view has not, so far as I know,
been presented on a high critical level, it is really widely held
and is almost a cultural assumption by many people. Perhaps
the most distinguished person to have championed the new
sensibility and the new attitudes toward the arts is Susan Sontag,
who wrote that "The distinction between high and low culture
seems less and less meaningful." She also said that such a
distinction is inseparable from "the Matthew Arnold idea of
culture." Susan Sontag has been misinterpreted and other
statements of hers have been ignored. She certainly did not
mean that cheap commercial art had suddenly become good.
There are also many half-baked arguments trying to elevate
junk into art. Some of the favorite ploys are to point to the fact
that Dickens has been widely read, as though anybody denies
that some serious writers are more accessible or more popular
than others, or that paperbacks sell lots of copies, which has to
do mostly with the question of textbooks and the study of
classics and not with the question of serious art that we're
discussing. Another argument is that serious art is nourished by
all kinds of popular and vulgar things, which is true. But by
analogy, it does not follow that because we eat all kinds of
things, some of it junk, we become the carrots or the hotdogs, or
the hash that we eat.
The issues have been polarized and mixed up with ideology
and the arguments often have nothing to do with what is going
on in the arts, particularly in the kind of fiction and poetry that
is outside the popular currents. Thus, neoconservatives like
Daniel Bell have been arguing for nonexistent standards and
