Vol. 69 No. 4 2002 - page 621

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARTS?
621
conformist than the self-defined alienated. In the universities, a literary
conformism rules, equating literature with fashionable leftist themes. And
beyond this, literature departments also promote the conformism that
paradoxically goes under the pluralist-sounding yet absolutist name of
"multiculturalism" or "diversity": a system of classification that reduces
literary culture to the venomous rivalries of group grievance. Post–
colonialist courses offer a study in specified villainies. Certain texts-ah,
how I have come to loathe the word
texts!--certain
texts are presented
uncritically, as gospel, without opposing or dissenting or contextual mat–
ter. Yet long ago, in my freshman year at NYU, Friedrich Hayek's
The
Road to Serfdom
was assigned together with its antithesis,
The Commu–
nist Manifesto-and
that was in the so-called Age of Conformity.
"It
is worth something," Norman Mailer wrote in
1952,
"to remind
ourselves that the great artists, certainly the moderns, are almost always
in opposition to their society, and that integration, acceptance, non–
alienation, etc., has been more conducive to propaganda than art." This
statement mayor may not reflect the tenor of many "great artists," even
among the moderns-is Thomas Mann, for instance, an alienated artist?
Is
Dubliners
a work of revolt? What we can say with certainty is that
the
study
of the great artists has recently tended to make art secondary
to propaganda, and sometimes invisible under propaganda's obscuring
film. In a democratic polity possessed of free critical expression through
innumerable outlets, the cry of alienation is itself a species of propa–
ganda. Nor, as that propaganda would have it, is self-congratulatory
jingoism the opposite of alienation. What the propaganda of alienation
seeks is not higher patriotism saturated in higher morality, as it pre–
tends, but simple disinheritance.
All this, admittedly, is curmudgeonly complaint. There is always a
Golden Age, the one not ours, the one that was or will be. One's own
time is never satisfactory, except to the very rich or the smugly oblivi–
ous.
It
is doubtful that high art, in strict opposition to mass culture, will
ever return: the two are inextricably intermingled, whether by sly allu–
sion in
The Simpsons,
or in Philip Roth's dazzling demotic voice. Ham–
burgers aside, low
has
enriched high; and surely Oprah has enriched
publishers, who are already mourning her defection in full-page news–
paper elegies. But nothing gives us license, even in the face of this
enlivening cultural mixture, to think that one man's terrorist is another
man's freedom fighter, or that art exists chiefly to serve grievance. Alien–
ation, after all, is the philistinism of the intellectual. As for the attention
given decades ago to
Advertisements for Myself,
if it were published
today, would anyone notice?
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