WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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invoking a dead past, while, in my OpinIOn, populists like
Herbert Cans in his last book, have been arguing for democracy
and against elitism in a way that has nothing to do with what is
actually going on in the arts. But at the risk of offending some of
you, I might say that such an approach is not unusual among
sociologists. Yesterday's
Times
had a statement by Harold
Schoenberg, that seems relevant to what we're talking about.
The piece struck me as being less an argument than a symptom
of the current revolt against the idea of Modernism and the
avant-garde. Schoenberg came out boldly and courageously for
the latest fashions: for representation, for melody, plot, for
popular art, for big audience, and he came out strongly against
snobbery. He calls the new art "Neoromanticism," but it sounds
a little like social realism. I had myself been arguing recently
that the era of Modernism and the avant-garde is not dead. After
reading Schoenberg's piece, I began to think that maybe I was
wrong, that maybe that era is over. I don't know exactly,
although I can guess, what our speakers are going to say. But my
own opinion is that our immediate task is not to praise or to
dismiss the current scene or the new era because we have to live
wi th it, but to try to understand it so that we can make some
discriminations and judgments.
Robert Brustein
"Do the old distinctions between high culture and
popular culture still apply?" The phrasing of this question
suggests two things: first , that people are faintly embarrassed by
these old-fashioned issues which once dominated intellectual
discussion, and, second, that the issues are, nevertheless, nag–
gingly with us still. Despite the success of the counterculture in
blurring their outlines in the sixties, these issues are not only
with us , they clamor for debate, if not for resolution.
So my answer to this question is resoundingly affirmative.
In fact, I believe that preserving the distinctions between high
and popular culture may constitute the central obligation of
