WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARTS?
633
Susanne Klingenstein:
My question is to Hilton Kramer. You've been
using the word
quality
a lot. Would you care to define what quality is?
If
you think of the fate of Caravaggio, who has been disparaged for so
long and is now rediscovered and rerecognized as a painter of quality,
isn't quality determined by the culture in which you live?
Hilton Kramer:
Standards of quality, the idea of quality itself, cannot be
defined. That is, there have been many attempts to do it, and none of
them has succeeded. Within each culture, of course, there is a certain
consensus about quality, which usually proves to be mistaken. The best
critic, in the end, is posterity. But, nonetheless, there are certain artists,
critics, connoisseurs, people who are interested in such things, who turn
out, as we know in retrospect, to be equipped to identify artistic
achievement in their own lifetime. There's a record of them . I think of
the French critic, Felix Feneon, who virtually single-handedly recog–
nized Seurat and promoted his reputation, which we totally accept
today, though before Feneon began writing about Seurat he seemed a
kind of eccentric to his contemporaries. Similarly, Roger Fry wrote early
on about Cezanne and Matisse, when everyone said that Cezanne did–
n't know how to draw. And there was the German critic Julius Meier–
Graefe, writing about some of the modern masters . And Clement
Greenberg wrote about certain American painters when they were being
denounced in every other quarter, who now are accepted as classics. So
it's not something that can be defined in advance. Yet we know from the
histor ical record that some people are more richly endowed with aes–
thetic judgment than others. And to dismiss this as just a kind of cul–
tural prejudice is, I'm afraid, to exclude yourself from serious
intellectual discussion.
Robert Brustein:
My field, Hilton, doesn't bear you out altogether. Vir–
tually every major work of the modern theater was condemned in its
own time, from
Ghosts
through
The Seagull,
which was laughed off the
stage.
Threepenny Opera
was treated as just a piece of red propaganda.
Hilton Kramer:
Which, of course, it was.
Robert Brustein:
Well, in your way of thinking. The major critics we
esteem, like Bernard Shaw, Kenneth Tynan, and so on, were more often
wrong than right. Kenneth Tynan dismissed Beckett, preferring John
Osborne; and Bernard Shaw, for example, denounced Oscar Wilde's
greatest work,
The Importance of Being Earnest.
We don't revere those
