WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARTS?
635
Jules Olitski:
I myself have made some. But in the end I was very fortu–
nate. But we make decisions. Faced with a piece of shit, I can only
decide it's low. And I don't think time will find any other justification.
Robert Brustein:
Gene Goodheart is asking for humility. I think it's a
very hard quality for critics like us to learn, but it's necessary. To give
you an example, I went to see a movie twice in one week. Once I went
with my friend Alvin Epstein; it was
Young Frankenstein,
and we both
hated it. Two days later I went with my son, who was then about four–
teen, and I loved it.
It
was the same movie, but I was in the company of
two different people. And I had
to
recognize that I'm not Olympian,
that I don't have the final judgment on everything I look at and see. It
induced a little humility, for about three minutes.
Hilton Kramer:
Well, if critics tend not to overly indulge in self-criticism,
it's because there are so many other people around to do that for them.
Daniel
Rose: I'd like to throw out a thought. In a discussion of the Greek
classics last week, I asked what I thought was an innocent question: why
is it that the only Greek playwrights we know of, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, were Athenians? Why did we not have lots of other plays
from other Greek cities? And I was told that there were no playwrights
in other Greek cities, that it was the Athenian Dionysian festivals that
brought forth the techniques, it was the Athenian audience that wanted
them, and it was the Athenian sponsors and patrons who paid for them.
Yes, you needed an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, a Euripides, an Aristo–
phanes. Presumably there were comparable people elsewhere. But they
didn't have the audience, the sponsors, and so forth. I found that a very
thought-provoking situation. One city produced Greek drama as we
know it, comparable groups did not. I think the moral may be that the
preconditions for the production of great art are terribly complex. That
you must have the artist, the sponsor, the audience, and the genre that
are ready for infusion of this talent. It would be interesting for us to
focus on the question of what we all can do to increase the various pre–
conditions for the production of great art in our society.
Robert Brustein:
Don't forget Plato and Aristotle, Thucydides, Pindar.
Not just drama, but poetry, philosophy, and history, everything. While
the Spartans were busy putting foxes in their tunics, the Athenians were
flowering. And it's a good argument against the geographical distribu–
tion of arts money, isn't it?
