WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARTS?
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Robert Brustein:
All it takes is one artist. We sit around in the desert,
feeling that we're living in a very sterile age, and then one artist comes
along and transforms our consciousness and our sense of our age. In the
theater it was O'Neill. America didn't have a decent dramatist for the
first hundred and fifty years of its existence, then along came O'Neill.
He was deeply criticized by a lot of people, including Lionel and me, but
ultimately, his last three or four plays are great masterpieces, as good as
anything that has been written in the past century. I would never have
guessed from the
dreek
that he was writing that was being praised and
getting all those awards that he ever could have been capable of writing
the kind of powerful and penetrating works that were represented by
Long Day's journey, The lee Man Cometh,
and
A Moon for the Mis–
begotten.
So we have
to
wait for the artist. He or she will come along,
and we will have a different sense of our age.
Darryl Hughto:
One of the reasons I think that the National Endowment
works better for institutions than it does for individual artists is
because, after all, these are all committee decisions, and it is easier
to
reach consensus about an institution rather than about an individual. I
suspect there is a lot of unanimity and agreement here as long as we're
talking abstractly, but if we all started mentioning names we might soon
find ourselves in disagreement. In the universities, supposedly represen–
tative of all points of view, one of the views that has been absent is what
Jules started out talking about, quality. All ethnicities have their voices
in these politically correct times, they all have their space on the faculty,
but the voice that speaks for quality is missing. And that's partly
because it threatens the most.
Hilton
Kramer: Shortly after I left the
New York Times,
I982,
one of my
successors on the paper, not John Russell, published a long article on the
Sunday arts page titled "Is Quality an Idea whose Time Has Passed?"
The burden of his article was "I hope so," because he depicted the very
idea of quality as an elitist, prejudicial concept that had been dreamed
up
to
defend the work of dead white Europeans and so on. So this dis–
paragement of quality didn't just come out of thin air.
It
was the prod–
uct of a formulated ideological campaign. At the
New York Times
they
could hardly wait for me
to
get out of there before they welcomed this
with open arms. The
Times
was moving further and further
to
the left
and embracing every form of political correctness.
