Popular and Unpopular Art
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: The subject tonight is, as you know,
"Popular and Unpopular Art," which would involve, of course,
the relation of the two. It is not an exact title for an inexact and
slippery subject. But, it is a way of getting into the large
question of the relation between what Saul Bellow recently
called "Big Audience Art" and "Small Audience Art" and into
the cultural changes, these fast-moving, sweeping, cultural
changes, that have altered this relation. These changes involve
the connection between various arts and their audiences, the
effect of the media on both the creation and the consumption of
art, the relation of money to art, and the developments in recent
years in painting, music, film, television. Part of the problem is
one of definition. Now we don ' t want to get into academic
definitions and semantic discussions, but I think I should point
out that the word "popular" and "unpopular" are loose terms
referring to different phenomena, and part of the confusion in
the past has come from the different use of the terms. For
example, the term "popular art" has been used to describe folk
art, jazz, best sellers, pop art, realistic or representational art,
television, musical comedies, opera, ballet, etc. I think we can
avoid confusion and hair-splitting if we keep in mind, not the
definitions of these terms, but the problems we want to discuss.
The question is an old one, but the formulation of the question
has obviously changed because the cultural climate has changed.
The classic argument for high or serious culture, the extreme
version of the position that lay behind the whole Modernist
period, was made by Ortega y Casset in
The Dehumanization of
Art,
which came out, if I remember correctly, in 1925, and was
EDITORS' NOTE: The evening on Popular and Unpopular Art took place at New York
University on March 21, 1977.
It
is the second in a series of discussions made possible by a
grant from the New York Council for the Humanities.
