354
PARTISAN REVIEW
to let art tell us what it is trying to do; we shouldn't sit waiting
for it with our net of requirements. It's a trite piece of advice, I
know, but this willing suspension of preconceptions is mani–
festly hard to practise.
The difficulty with popular art is a certain kind of empti–
ness. I'm not thinking of the vacuity which moralising critics
keep finding there, although there is a fair amount of vacuity
going the rounds, of course. What I have in mind is an absence
where serious art offers us a presence. It is easy, I think, to enjoy
the skills of a show like
Kojak,
or
Columbo,
or
The Rockford
Files,
or
The Name of the Game-the
way it's put together, the
style of the editing, the pace of the thing, the use of music, and so
on. And it's also easy to interpret this sort of show
sociologically-to wonder why nearly all current television
thriller series feature policemen and policewomen as heroes and
heroines, for example, and to wonder what happened to private
eyes and fugitives and outlaws. Rockford, in the show I've just
mentioned, is dearly a deliberate anachronism. But there's the
rub. These sort of interests-I'll call them technical and socio–
logical interests-are almost always marginal or academic in the
appreciation of art as we usually understand it. Who cares how
Anna Karenina
is put together, or what it says about Russia in
the 1870s? Well, we care. But that's not why we're reading the
book. As I've suggested, we can be unduly solemn in looking to
our art for a criticism of life. But that' s not a reason for being
happy with an art which looks as if it simply can't offer such a
criticism.
We have arrived, in fact, at the good old distinction between
art and entertainment. Art disturbs us, and entertainment
doesn't. Or to put that more precisely, art disturbs us a lot, and
entertainment disturbs us too, but as little as it can-its business
is to make its disturbances as unnoticeable as possible. I am
content with that, and I think many of our worries are settled
once we can tell art from entertainment, and enjoy both, and
welcome their increasingly infrequent mingling. But even here
we should be careful not to freeze ourselves into our terms. They
are only words, meant to help us, not to imprison us. Hitchcock,
for example, like Chaplin, is an entertainer and an artist,
