WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARTS?
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tion or system. They are colored by the conservative, radical, and liberal
hues of the political spectrum alike. To change my metaphor, the arts are
under siege from three horsemen of what may be eventually seen as a cul–
tural apocalypse, vigilante night riders who guard the right, left, and
middle walls of the American castle looking for a deviant artist. From the
right gallops the horse of moral correctness, determined to purify the arts
according to preconceived standards of decency. From the left canters the
horseman of political correctness, committed to laundering the arts of
any perceived threat to racial, sexual, or ethnic sensitivities. And from
the middle trots the horseman of aesthetic correctness, demanding that
the arts conform to traditional, often conventional, rules of creative pro–
cedure. Besieged by every ideological camp, increasingly deprived of the
funds with which to underwrite professional pursuits, it is a wonder that
the serious artist has continued to survive at all in such a hostile climate.
Tocqueville, who has been much quoted this session, predicted this, as
he predicted so much else about American culture. "I do not believe that
it is a necessary effect of democratic institutions to diminish the number
of those who cultivate the fine arts," he wrote in a famous passage from
Democracy in America,
"but these causes exert a powerful influence on
the manner in which these arts are cultivated. In aristocracies, a few
great pictures are produced, in democratic countries, a vast number of
insignificant ones." To his mind, in short, future artistic standards would
be determined not by the intrinsic quality of the art, but by the extrinsic
size of the audience. The fact that mass culture would absorb high art
would henceforth worry many social commentators . But these fears
intensified during the cultural wars of the 1950S, when such crusading
highbrows as Dwight Macdonald typically began protesting the power
of what he called masscult and midcult to debase and overshadow High–
cult. And you'll notice that even the terms Macdonald uses to indict pop–
ular culture seem to be influenced by the language of the mass periodical
that he sometimes worked for,
Time
magazine. Raging in such periodi–
cals as
Partisan Review
and
Commentary,
these culture wars not only
planted wedges between high, middle, and popular culture, they also
resulted in a serious backlash against serious art and the critical intelli–
gence, a backlash reinforced by democratic leveling, sociological theo–
rizing, and multicultural dogmatizing. This eventually spread to include
the whole construct of European civilization and its dead white male
artists and intellectuals. Some day a cultural historian will measure the
damage created by a single word, "elitism," on the whole scaffolding of
American culture. It is a word that effectively treated the idea of excel–
lence and leadership as a foreign, class- and race-conscious concept. The
