WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARTS?
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in Gloucester up on Cape Ann . I went to public grade school and high
school. In grade school, right after we learned to read, we were taught
to read music. And everybody had to sing in the chorus from sheet
music. That has played a central role in making serious music an inte–
gral part of my life . This was a grade school in which many of the kids
were children of Italian and Portuguese fishermen who had never spo–
ken a word of English at home before they entered first grade. All these
kids could read and, to some extent, write English at the end of the first
grade. In Washington they're ta lking about people learning to read by
the third grade. Well , what are they doing those first two years? To say
that you have to learn to read by the end of the third grade is already
an admission of defeat.
Robert Brustein:
It's just as bad in the university. I am in the English
Department at Harvard, and we were handed a list of books that were
going to be required of our graduating students. Missing from that list
(a twentieth-century list) was any book by Hemingway, Fitzgerald,
Philip Roth, Thomas Mann, you name it. Lots of Alice Walker, Toni
Morrison, what have you, but the major books of the twentieth century
were missing. But we have another danger, which is that we begin to
emphasize what we call "high art" at the expense of the way high art is
formed. I want to go back to one of Cynthia Ozick's points, namely that
high art without a popular component is missing something. It's miss–
ing a certain energy. The demotic voice Cynthia Ozick finds in Philip
Roth is really the voice of popular art. And that's why I love the theater,
because it introduces a vulgar component, a component of vaudeville, a
component of wild and open comedy, for example, music. These things
have to refresh what could be the mandarin sterility of high art, to keep
it alive, keep it fresh. So we mustn't be too censorial and too strict about
how we define high art.
Joan Bamberger:
I'm a social anthropologist. I would like to say some–
thing about the artists who have been so reviled here, in particular
about Andres Serrano, Chris Ofili, and Damien Hirst. I'd like to suggest
that in turning the body inside out and using bodily substances as paint
and other materials, they're trying to make a comment on the degener–
acy and decay of our society. Hasn't it always been one of the goals of
art to comment about life and to make us think more or differently
about it?
