What Happened to the Arts?
Edith Kurzweil:
Hilton Kramer is the moderator this morning. Next to
him are Jules Olitski and Bob Brustein . Cynthia Ozick couldn't come,
because she suddenly got very ill, but she sent her paper. Joanna Rose
has agreed to read it, but we miss Cynthia.
Hilton Kramer: Jules
Olitski will speak first.
Jules Olitski: I
call this "Barley Soup and Art-High and Low." I came
upon this introduction browsing
The Crown of Wild Olive
by John
Ruskin. He says, "My friends-I have not come among you ... to
endeavor to give you an entertaining lecture, but to tell you a few plain
facts, and to ask you some plain, but necessary questions ." I thought
that was pretty good. All I was going to say was "Hi."
My talk has mostly to do with quality: it is under attack. Long before
I could spell the word, I experienced it in a rather homespun way, with
the barley soup my mother fed me when I was a child, a boy, a man.
Barley soup-I've had it in restaurants: in Coney Is land, in Flatbush, in
Brooklyn, in New York's Lower East Side, in Patchogue, an exotic
place, in Paris, London, Madrid. I like barley soup, I'm a connoisseur of
barley soup . Curiously, one of the best soups that I had was at the Old
Horn and Hardart, a cafeteria long gone, but it was terrific, ten cents.
The pleasure I get from barley soup, which serves the appetite, is of a
different nature, of course, than aesthetic pleasure, which serves the
spirit. Taste is the only path to qua lity, to aesthetic p leasure in art, music,
poetry, and literature. As taste develops, so does one's pleasure, one's aes–
thetic p leasure. Pleasure doesn't make you tal ler, better, skinnier, richer.
It
doesn't make you more of anything. Nicholas Poussin said the goal of
art is delight.
It
grabs you; it takes you out of yourself, out of time.
It
is
a unique experience.
It
is what one may experience looking at a Rem–
brandt self-portrait, or hearing Handel's
Xerxes,
or reading
Wordsworth's
Home at Grasmere,
which I think is just a wonderful piece
of work . I remember coming all of a sudden upon Vermeer's
View of
Delft.
I was wa lking towards it, I must have been about twenty feet or
more away, and I didn't even know it was a Vermeer. One doesn't swoon
anymore since the nineteenth century, but like a maiden I swooned; I
