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that people are told, you are your background. If you aspire to something
beyond, you suffer from wanting to be something you're not. The point I
am making is that across all disciplines, sports, journalism, popular enter–
tainment for young people, we have a vision of each other that has to be
changed. Not change in the interest of repression, but in the interest of
variety.
John Silber:
Thank you all.
Part Three. Art and CuHure
Igor Webb:
Adelphi trustee Hilton Kramer will chair this panel.
Hilton Kramer:
Thank you very much. My own view of the Enlighten–
ment is that it marks the dawn of the modern age, in which all of the
conditions and problems of creating art come to the surface, in a way
they had never before. The best book I know of on the subject is Paul
Johnson's
The Beginning of the Modern Age.
The conditions under which
the arts and cultural life generally are created are those governed by the
spirit of intellectual emancipation, the spirit of liberal culture, and the re–
sistance to the spirit of liberal culture. The secularization of art in culture
and the resistance to it. I have no idea if that is how the subject is going
to be discussed this morning, because we're dealing here with rugged in–
dividualists, but I don't see how those issues could be avoided.
Our speaker this morning is Denis Donoghue, the distinguished Irish
critic and literary scholar, who occupies the Henry James Professorship in
English at New York University. His most recent book is a very fine
study of the English writer Walter Pater.
