THE STATE OF CRITICISM
199
arm-wrestled them into giving him as much space as he wants on
Sunday to be able
to
explore a subject in some depth.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: I thought you were saying something else-that
there is
almost
no serious art criticism, or very little, not that there's
no forum for it.
JOHN CUDDIHY: Is not this sense of the belatedness of the great modern
gone? We have no stick any longer with which to beat the bourgeoi–
sie. We can't beat up on America any
longer~
BARBARA ROSE: We
are
the bourgeoisie. What are you talking about?
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Talk for yourself, Barbara. You write for
Vogue–
that's the bourgeoisie.
JOHN CUDDIHY: Part of the allure of structuralism is that it's filling a
vacuum.
BARBARA ROSE: The allure of structuralism-the allure of semiotic
analysis-is that it resolves the problem. You don't need great art to
use it as a methodology. You can use it on fashion , on Bugs Bunny,
on anything.
IRVING HOWE: Mr. Cuddihy's remarks are crude. Whatever we did or
didn't do with Marx, and that's a subject for another occasion, we
didn't use him as a stick with which to beat the moderns.
JOHN CUDDIHY: Not the moderns!
IRVING HOWE: The bourgeoisie.
JOHN CUDDIHY: The philistines
I
WILLIAM ·PHILLIPS: We didn't use him as a stick to beat anybody.
IRVING HOWE: Thank you. We tried to understand the world. The
question of the extent
to
which we succeeded or failed is another
matter for anothe.r occasion. The sense of cultural difficulty at the
moment has to do with the dispossession of Marx. Marx is all over
the place, in a form I don't like. It's the academicized Marx, a kind of
walking corpse, that one encounters these days. There are far deeper
issues having to do with the gradual disintegration of the modernist
impulse and the uncertainty as to what, if anything, comes after–
ward. The challenge to the very idea of valuation is deeply to be
found in the whole culture, as well as the uncertainty as to what
culture means at this particular historical moment.
HILTON KRAMER: Irving, we've at last found something
to
disagree on:
something is either good or pretentious.
If
you no longer have the
modernist aesthetic, or Marxism in some form as an instrument for
bludgeoning philistine stupidity, then you do remove a good deal of
the function of criticism for quite a few decades. That was more or
less what Cuddihy was saying. And that is a simple, straightforward
