454
PARTISAN REVIEW
full-time arts teachers to stimulate their imaginations. This is not only a
cultural but a social problem. Lacking early grounding in music, drama, and
painting, kids will inevi tably spend their time watching action movies and
playing computer games, and, when they grow up, will only be able to
appease the instinctive hunger for art, music, and poetry with the easily
digested fast food of rap, rock, and grafitti.
Undergraduates can be stretched in the arts not just through practice
in extracurricular activities, but through being exposed to professional per–
formance, incl uding the li terature of the field and the practical skills
associated with it. Mter such a continuum of artistic exposure, whether as
a member of the audience or as a practitioner or both, the serious student
of the arts would then be prepared to enter an appropriate graduate–
professional school for more advanced training in his or her chosen field.
It is an ideal vertical arrangement that could potentially train the ideal
spectator and the ideal artist. The system in operation today produces nei–
ther-only arrogant amateurs and ignorant professionals.
When McNeil Lowry was vice president
in
charge of the
Arts
Program
at the Ford Foundation, he refused to fund any cultural initiatives associated
with a university, in the belief that they were bound to be oflow quality and
informed by amateur standards. Neither I nor anyone else could ever per–
suade
him
otherwise, even through demonstrated artistic achievement over
a period of years. We could never convince him that a society that had so lit–
de opportunity to find satisfying artistic experiences in the popular media
might discover those cultural resources in institutions of higher learning. I'm
not quite ready to concede that Lowry was correct in his belief that the uni–
versity would always exalt the amateur over the professional, that the cultural
(as opposed to the educational) standards of academia would always be as
indifferent to excellence as those in the world at large. I'm also not ready to
admit that the university has ceased to function as an alternative to society
and instead has begun to endorse its careerist, pragmatic values. That is, not
quite yet. But I'm coming awfully close.
Bernard
Avishai: I want to make two preliminary remarks. Reading
between the lines, there are two assumptions that have been made about
markets, corporations, and so forth. The first is that markets demand-cor–
porations demand-as they always have, over-specialized, philistine,
utilitarian, cynically anti-intellectual people. And the second is that the
new technologies contribute to the philistinization of our children, that
these technologies are in some way continuous with the mass media, the
enervation of our children. I think these assumptions are not just wrong
but the opposite of the truth. What I'm about to say will get back to these
two points.
