WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARTS?
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But for some reason, Attorney General Reno chose to appeal that deci–
sion, and there is no question that, as a religious fundamentalist, Attor–
ney General Ashcroft will be even more vigilant about any deviations
from approved moral and religious norms.
Political correctness, though just as watchful as moral correctness,
also seems to be loosening its repressive stranglehold on the high arts a
little, if not on the institutions where it is held in the tightest grip, mainly
the university and the nonprofit theatre. Tireless free speech agencies,
such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Harvey Silverglate's and
Alan Kors's FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights
in
Education)
have been monitoring the tendencies of universities to punish any viola–
tions of strict sexual, moral, and racial codes. Novels such as Phillip
Roth's
The Human Stain
and Francine Prose's
Blue Angel,
not to men–
tion J. M. Coetzee's
Disgrace,
which describes the same conditions in
South Africa, have satirized the excesses promoted by sexual harass–
ment and date rape rules
in
the academy.
In
the theatre, Jonathan
Reynolds's
Stonewall Jackson 'S House
and Rebecca Gilman's
Spinning
into Butter
have exposed the way white theatre directors and academics
buckle under real or imagined accusations by racial pressure groups.
And a number of feminist, black, latino, and gay writers have been per–
mitting an element of surprise and unpredictability to enter into work
that has hitherto been rather rigid and ideological, and that is a big plus.
Aesthetic correctness brings us to ourselves, a number of us anyway,
including me, and it presents a somewhat knottier question, because the
condition it reflects has a much longer history. Over centuries, the critic
and the artist, in the guise of academic and professional or theorist and
practitioner, have confronted each other with suspicion and anger over
how the arts should be conducted. Posterity, which is all we have to
appeal to as artists, may ultimately vindicate the presumed deviations of
the artist in his or her own time, but it is the critic's judgment that most
influences contemporary taste. And just as the critic tells people what to
think about a work of art, so the theorist tells the artists how to create,
often by imposing rules on creative expression.
In
the past, such orthodox
agencies as the Academie Fran\=aise, demanding strict conformity to the
unities, forced Corneille in
Le Cid
to squeeze the events of forty years into
a single day. Today, those with the same custodial mentality, still guarding
the gates like Switzers before the Vatican, often rebuke high art for draw–
ing on the often vibrant if sometimes vulgar energies of popular culture,
thus driving the wedge between them even deeper. Moral correctness,
political correctness, and aesthetic correctness all derive from the same
