WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARTS?
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in bad shape. Are there enough Americans with enough common sense
to not give a hoot about the academics and their theories and all the art
world crap
to
prevail? I pray there are.
Hilton Kramer:
Before calling our next speaker, I'll interject first a cor–
rection and then a couple of observations . Marcel Duchamp's urinal,
called
The Fountain,
actually an inverted urinal, was not exhibited in
the Armory Show, but in the
1917
show of the Independents in New
York . In the Armory Show he showed
Nude Descending a Staircase.
It's
important to note that it was after the Armory Show that Duchamp
clearly recognized that as a cubist painter he wasn't going
to
make it
into the league of Picasso and Braque and turned to other means.
Jules mentioned Gilbert and George. This is the case where it is always
worse than you think.
It
became almost mandatory among art critics in
the London Sunday papers to compare Gilbert and George's shit paint–
ings with Grunewald's
Isenheim Altar-one
of those automatic compar–
isons, as with Michelangelo's
David.
In the midst of that and the scandals
over the terrible Turner Prize recipients, I was invited to participate in a
forum at the Tate Gallery to discuss the implications of the Turner Prize.
They always need an old fogey
to
be wheeled in
to
provide them with
entertainment, otherwise it's boringly unanimous in approving of every–
thing low. In the course of that, there was a lot of talk about transgres–
sive art and transgressive materials, and I, in my innocence, said to the
audience that the only material I could see that could any longer be
regarded as transgressive was human feces. I hadn't yet seen that put to
use, but all these hands went up in the audience. They were all artists
who either used that material or knew someone who did. So there's no
way out of it; this is one of the horrors we're currently stuck with.
Our next speaker is probably well-known
to
most of you . Robert
Brustein, Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theatre, Profes–
sor of English at Harvard, and the theatre critic for
The New Republic.
Robert Brustein:
My talk is titled "The Four Horsemen of the Anti–
Culture." Recently, we were told that an ice shelf the size of Delaware
broke off from mainland Antarctica and floated off to sea. That seems
like a metaphor for the fate of serious culture in this country. We are wit–
nessing the not-so-gradual disappearance of what used
to
pass for Amer–
ican high art, whether we are talking about performing arts or serious
literature or classical music or the visual arts. Typical is the fate of
National Public Radio, which recently announced a total restructuring of
its cultural vision, aimed at increased coverage of popular culture. The
