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PARTISAN REVIEW
was a kind of clearing ground for them to take a fresh breath. Then
you start on this now one hundred-and-fifty-year-old battle between
what is good and what is unworthy.
BRlISTEIN: Stanley, American playwrights have been trying to do that
for the last fifteen years.
KAUFFMAN: Sam Shepard, Chris Durang, William Hauptman ...
BRUSTEIN: It's an absorption of the mass media in the same way that
Handke did, much more powerfully than Handke did, in an attempt
to
use those effects as metaphors, as myths, on which to build a form
of theatrical art.
And if I can answer your second question. I thought I was trying
to
answer that before. I think that you're right, that the question is
improperly phrased, that what is implicit in the question i this: are
the media going
to
the avant-garde and mediating, as media do,
between the avant-garde and popular commercial culture? Are they
bringing the avant-garde instantly
to
the attention of newspapers, of
television audiences and, let's say, of commercial entrepreneurs, who
thereupon take that and commercialize it? Richard Foreman works
off Broadway. Joe Papp finds him and has him do a kit ch version of
Three-Penny Opera.
Andre Serban does a magnificent work,
Frag–
ments of A Trilogy.
Joe Papp finds him again and puts on
The
Cherry Orchard.
Robert Wilson has not yet been LOuched in that
way.
KAUFFMAN: But still he's changed by the audience change.
BRusTEIN: Perhaps, but the tendency is
to
identify artists much more
quickly than ever before. because of the instant replay effect of the
media. To identify the genuine artists of the culture as they are
beginning to emerge and evolve, grab them and fix them, transfix
them, impale them as it were, and stop their growth.
0
I think that's
what the question implied and all the panelists tried to address that
question, if I'm not mistaken.
Weare saddened by the death of
Mason Gross
a friend and co-chairman of our advisory board.
