LETTERS
On Mass Culture Editor: More power to "high culture," by all means, but is Bernard Rosenberg's cri de coeur really likely to contribute to the worthy cause he espouses? Allow me to touch on a...
...Item: If anthropologists have found that "no human society...
...3. Elementary, my dear Wyszkowski...
...It need not be eliminated any more than taste buds or libidinal impulses...
...Because space is so precious, I must deal with the "items" which do not hold "water" even more elliptically than my critic raises them: 1. Better nothing than Arthur Miller...
...W. On to the New Nixon Era...
...Item: Small children indeed "everywhere spontaneously express themselves," more or less, with "whatever art materials they find," but adults, similarly, not just because of the presence of "masscult," but because of much more complex factors not unknown to behavioral scientists, factors which render spontaneity "rarely attainable later on" (as Rosenberg says of the "authenticity" with which youngsters react to art...
...Allow me to touch on a few points in his article (DissENr, July–August 1968) that seem to me to hold, at best, very little water: Item: On the one hand, Arthur Miller, being presumably "mid-cult," just won't do, yet it is to be deplored that only one per cent of the population sees plays "on the stages of America...
...2. Of course changes in public attitudes are "at least partially" a reflection of actual events...
...The following memo was circulated to the staff of Fuller, Smith and Ross, advertising agency at 666 Fifth Avenue, New York City, handling the Nixon campaign account...
...It is for us that "exotic artifacts" have become art, or high culture...
...Or does Rosenberg imply that in the pre-TV past the constantly changing pattern of international enmities and alliances was sternly resisted by the world's peoples...
...5. My analogies were sexual and gustatory...
...4. I said a good deal of how one unfits a man for the other...
...But what are those 99 per cent missing, anyway...
...Like other human needs, the aesthetic sense can be sustained or destroyed...
...Len Garment of the Nixon PresidentElect Headquarters...
...Item: The changes of public attitude in recent history toward Russia, China, and Japan are adduced as proof of the media's brainwashing potential...
...TO THE STAFF November 8, 1968 PLEASE No employees of FSR is to talk, answer questions, or give out information of any nature regarding the Nixon campaign...
...Wyszkowski's thoughtful letter deserves an extended reply...
...The alternative is immediate dismissal...
...A little may be homeopathic...
...But 1 wrote of public, even proletarian, responsiveness to Shakespeare, Moliere, and genuine dramatists of our day, suggesting that a turn away from Broadway, Culture Centers, and their values would make theater available to multitudes for whom it is currently unavailable...
...On Mass Culture Editor: More power to "high culture," by all means, but is Bernard Rosenberg's cri de coeur really likely to contribute to the worthy cause he espouses...
...BOB ALLEN...
...Any and all questions are to be referred to Mr...
...is devoid of art," that does not mean that all human societies have had high culture...
...for the people who produced them they were, as anthropologists well know, much more immediately functional (as religious objects, for example) than high art ever has been...
...Surely there must be a blessing in not being exposed at least to Arthur Miller, not to speak of Neil Simon...
...BERNARD ROSENBERO replies: Mr...
...Allow me a final note of aesthetic puzzlement: Why—for an article upholding high culture—use a title reverberating with that frisson some masscultists may experience at the chance of using a "chic" foreign phrase...
...Item: If "sub-art" has a tendency, as Rosenberg maintains, to unfit a person for art, has Rosenberg himself become at least partially unfit for art because of his "delectation" in Gold Diggers of 1936, an enthusiasm that surely must extend to many other examples of the genre...
...How your little recapitulation relates to any part of my argument I do not know...
...But are not those changes at least partially a reflection of actual events in the world...
...By the same token, because mass culture has a totalitarian potential reaching into every corner of our lives, we are more manipulable under its impact than in the absence of propaganda that can be instantaneously disseminated to whole populations...
...6. The title, not mine, bothered me as much as it did Mr...
Vol. 16 • January 1969 • No. 1
