592
PARTISAN REVIEW
part of democratic culture, with its own institutions, stars, events, and
audiences (including, for example, ritualistic tributes at institutions like
the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York). During the I980s
and I990S, operas were written about figures like Harvey Milk, Bolivar,
Gandhi, Mao, and Frida Kahlo, which were really musical "lives of the
saints." The audience was expected to enter with the proper sentiments
already in place and have them affirmed during the course of the work.
These operas-and other related works-contained scornful portrayals
of American culture and evil plottings by moguls and businessmen; there
were repeated genuflections toward the martyred rebel and his quest for
true democracy instead of the masquerading tyranny surrounding him.
This could become cartoonish to the point of agitprop.
In
I 995, for
example, the composer John Adams collaborated on a musical theater
work
I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky,
about a
young black man who is tried in a courthouse presided over by a
grotesquely outfitted white judge, an enormous swastika above his head,
along with an American flag with swastikas instead of stars. This was a
production not of a marginal avant-garde theater, but of Lincoln Center.
Other examples, particularly in the visual arts, abound.
But these attacks on American democratic culture are also related to
the
nature
of this culture.
If
there really is no hierarchy in a democracy,
and if great and equal satisfactions are promised, then any failure to
achieve the great satisfactions
see~s
due to a miscarriage of justice as
serious as the villainy in societies where such promises are nonexistent
fantasies. Imperfections and blemishes are signs of catastrophic flaws
and evils. Dissent from the majority-something that defines democ–
racy-turned into unmollifiable opposition. A few years ago I attended
a touring exhibition of artwork condemned by the Nazis. In a guest
book containing comments about the exhibition, one tourist's quite seri–
ous comments invoked contemporary American notions of injustice and
asked why more women weren't represented in the exhibition; such are
the grievances in a liberal democracy.
Similarly, the current exhibition of Nazi-related art at the Jewish
Museum in New York, in which an artist is seen holding a Coke can
aloft amid Buchenwald's prisoners or a Prada label is placed in the mid–
dle of a death camp, an attempt is made, perhaps, to mock American
commercialization of the Holocaust. But the real point, according to the
artists and catalogue, is to assert that as beneficiaries of American cap–
italism we should see ourselves as practitioners of parallel oppression
and potential practitioners of worse . This is a grotesque failure to rec–
ognize gross differences, let alone subtleties. So the rebel artist becomes
