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PARTISAN REVIEW
Jules Olitski:
It
strikes me that there is a terrible irony in the success of
what I would call advanced or high art, the art of the fifties and sixties,
artists like Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hoffman. This success
and the attention it brought, particularly to Pollock and de Kooning, led
many young artists without talent to do similar things. Many people
said, "My three-year-old can do that." Well those three-year-olds heard
that, so much of our art has virtually nothing to do with art.
Robert Brustein: I
don't think we've sufficiently appreciated Cynthia
Ozick's wonderful paper. She was talking about the great debates of the
fifties and sixties and how excited everyone was about certain issues,
and I can testify that my son was born prematurely as a result of the
conflict over
Eichmann in Jerusalem.
At a party at Stanley Moss's
house, I got in a big fight with Lionel Abel over it; we were drawn on
both sides of the issue. I was defending Hannah Arendt's book, which I
thought was brilliant, and was in the minority. The fight got so heated
that my wife broke her water all over Stanley Moss's carpet and my son
was born six weeks prematurely. Would that happen today?
Hilton Kramer:
Well, undoubtedly, there was a great deal more open
vociferous argument about literary and artistic matters then . But I don't
think it's just a matter of thinking back to the good old days, because
there's a lot about those good old days that I didn't particularly like.
Susan Roth:
My overriding concern is about education and what's hap–
pening at the university. When I went to school, I didn't seem to need
the kind of courage my son needed to get a good education in the
humanities.
In
fact, his freshman year was so difficult I sent him a copy
of your articles, Mr. Kramer, on the difficulty of getting a good human–
ities-based education.
It
seems to me that so much of what we're talk–
ing about, such as taste and finding an audience, has to do with
educating an audience. And if there's any gloom that sits on my shoul–
ders, it is that cultural relativism has replaced judgment, analysis, and
the cultivation of taste.
Hilton Kramer: That
is a crucial issue, but it begins before freshman year
at the college or university, because most of the kids coming into their
first year in college now are too ill-prepared by their secondary educa–
tion to deal with the materials for study. And most of the teaching in the
humanities in colleges and universities has been so politically corrupted
that real reforms have to come earlier. I grew up just north of Boston,
