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PARTISAN REVIEW .
entitled to it; it's the law. Then the money is distributed to the highest
quality productions and artists. And the judges are not chosen from
around the country willy-nilly, but are those who are known to be qual–
ified to judge. So that you really do continue with, for want of a better
word, the production of taste. Ultimately, quality does reproduce itself.
Robert Brustein:
Clearly democracy has been one of the villainous invo–
cations regarding the arts in this group . And it has not been a great
friend to the arts. The generous impulse of democracy to be equal to
everyone is hostile to the notion of hierarchical art. I did not invent
dumbing down,
Edith, but thank you for attributing it to me. I invented
the phrase
dumbocracy,
which is how I was trying to describe the way
we approach the arts. But in defense of democracy, this country has
been hospitable to the most extraordinary artists and to the most extra–
ordinary critics, people of real discrimination, Lionel Trilling, Edmund
Wilson, Clement Greenberg, and so on . You know them better than I
do. And we've also been host to some very discriminating audiences.
The odd thing about this country is that it's always moving from one
side to the other crazily and irritatingly. We happen to be on one end of
the pendulum, which looks pretty dim, dark, and depressing at the
moment. But the pendulum does swing. And though sometimes there
are groups like this, with more people on the panel than in the audience,
because there's no more interest in the intellect or in the arts, it will
swing and we'll get back to where we were.
GaryShapiro:Has
there been a simi lar dumbing down in Europe as well
as America? And if the pendulum swings back, who might be the lead–
ers and the bright spots who are creating great art and literature? Who
might you say would be on the positive sides? Where is the good in the
culture today?
Hilton Kramer:
Well, in Britain, for example, the decline of the educa–
tional system has become so grave that kids leaving school have no idea
who Winston Churchill was until they see a television program about
him. A lot of the problems we've had in this country are present in
Europe. Who was the last painter in Paris you gave a damn about? Vir–
tually nobody from the post-World War II period. The same is true in
many parts of Europe. In literature it's a somewhat different story,
maybe in composing classical music. But in painting it's very, very thin.
