DIANA TRILLING
815
democratic position . For instance, I'm in favor of public libraries
and in favor of public art museums but I'm against trying to get
people to use public libraries or to use art museums. I'm against
the whole technique of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metro–
politan and so on, of trying to get people to come and see their
pictures . My idea of a good museum is a warehouse : the Louvre
or something like that. A place where everything is made as diffi–
cult as possible and the only people that go there are people that
want to see the pictures. And the masses don't go there because
the masses don't give a damn about art. My theory is that in any
culture, including a High Renaissance, not more than twenty or
twenty-five percent, at the most , give a goddamn about culture .
This whole business is a kind of a cultural- a peculiar kind of
democratic snobbism . It's everybody's right to be cultured, but it's
not everybody's
duty
to be cultured . This King Tut exhibition is
everything that I'm opposed to in the museum world today. Peo–
ple lining up . Applying for tickets. By the millions. And the Tut is
bad Egyptian art; it's much too late to be any good at all ; they
have much better art from Egypt there which nobody pays any at–
tention to, in the Middle East Department. But anyway , that
always bothered me, and I solved it as follows. Everybody is an
expert in politics. You have a right to have an opinion; it's a
democratic thing. Whereas art is, to me, a completely snobbish
thing. You have no right to crowd the museums if you don't know
anything about art and if you just go because you think it's your
democratic right. You have no right to do it because you make it
hard for me to go and see the pictures, for one thing.
DT:
All right then, how do you feel about universities?
DM:
All for them. Of course. One of the things that bothered me
about the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], which I was
all for too , because they were very anarchistic, you know, and I
love anarchism- they weren't Marxists at all- was that they were
ignoramuses. They had no respect for the past, no interest in the
past. The Old Left considered that culture was the heritage of the
working class and should therefore be preserved and paid respect
to; the only trouble was that the working class was excluded from
it. But when I read of the New Left attacking the libraries, it was
as if I was religious and they were profaning a cathedral.
DT:
Then you're not anarchist?
DM:
I
am
anarchist. Kropotkin was an anarchist. Emma Goldman
was anarchist. But they were very cultivated people. It would
