That Cultural Explosion

...You cannot pick up a paper without reading of some politician who has declared that we are engaged in a battle for men's minds and that we must broaden our program of cultural exchange...

...The statement is just a little too rich for the reasonable man to digest without gagging...

...Bad culture continues to drive out good on the airwaves, in the movies, even on records and on the stage...

...But there is a final factor in the cultural boom which must be accounted for...

...Undoubtedly, there is more leisure available now than at any time in our history...

...The preservation of the true value of our culture involves its continued restatement in the contemporary world . . . what we must guard against is the use of the word 'culture' to mean only the culture of the past . . . preserving our culture means keeping it alive, and keeping it alive means listening to it when it tries to tell us something about the world in which we are currently living...

...Hence, they have always tended to wait for Europe or for history to place the stamp of approval on an artist or a work before they dare to express their own approval...

...How deep, how genuine will be its commitment to excellence...

...Even then he can expect half the audience to walk out before the first down-beat of his work and the other half to nod sleepily as it proceeds...

...Thus, a good share of the dynamite in the cultural explosion is made out of greed...

...A minor orchestra— Louisville's—has probably presented more new works in the past decade than all the major American orchestras combined...

...It is not a uniquely American phenomenon...

...Our mass culture has a metallic ring to it...

...The day Americans—a much more sizable minority of them than now exists—love art for its own sake and are deeply engaged in its processes, the day a new artistic enterprise can stir u p a good argument and attract a decent-sized audience—on that day we can begin to believe in the reality of a genuine cultural millennium...

...Last year, for example, we consumed (a better word than read) one million paperback books per day...

...One might have hoped that we would not force the growth of interest in the arts for such a mundane reason...

...Serious commentators like David Riesman are beginning to suggest clinics to improve the individual's chances of finding meaningful leisure occupations...

...It is also possible to give all your money to a cultural institution— and then live, virtually taxfree, on an allowance doled out to you by the lucky institution...

...That medium has achieved something like ninety per cent saturation of the nation's homes and, to quote that most dismal of statistics once again, there are now more television sets than bathrooms in the United States...

...The American man of affairs has always been too busy to pay much attention to the arts and has been more than happy to put art in a pigeonhole, remote from the rest of life, and to let his wife watch over it...

...It would be far more remarkable if we were not...

...Seven hundred and twentyeight opera production groups now operate within the continental limits, if not always within the limits of the highest critical standards...

...For the most part a young composer can wedge himself on to a program only by the most adroit maneuvering, and he can expect exactly $50 for his efforts—half of which must go to his publisher...

...Some items: the only full-time professional opera in America—the Metropolitan—almost never puts on American works, new or old, and only rarely presents works of the world repertory that were written in this century, Puccini aside...

...The graphic arts are dominated by a tiny circle of critics, dealers, and collectors...

...Here, the achievements of the American cultural "renaissance" are open to serious question...

...Qualitatively, it may or may not yet be a great culture, but quantitatively there is an awful lot of it...

...A prediction that this minority is about to become a majority is about as sensible as the notion of a new Atlantis rising out of the sea...

...Already the forty hour week is a thing of the past for six million Americans...

...Our artists have enthusiastically joined in the clamor...

...Last year more than twice as many people trouped through New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art than passed through the turnstiles of Yankee Stadium (although, admittedly, the Bombers were having a bad season...

...It is the last adjective which is, historically, the key one...

...There are practically no worthwhile young playwrights coming along, and the older ones apparently stopped thinking in 1939...

...As of last June, more than 3,500 American artists, in 132 productions, had appeared in a total of 102 foreign countries...

...And here, by making some statistical comparisons, we can gain an important insight into the sincerity of the nation's desire for cultural improvement...

...The figures are, at first glance, impressive...

...On a less frenzied basis we seem to be forcing culture on them for the same reason...

...It is enlisted on our side in the cold war...

...And, just to top it all off, a statisticallyminded choreographer recently fluttered back to New York with the startling intelligence that one out of two American families would like to see some member of the family circle take u p the dance...

...Their chief value undoubtedly belongs to the realm of therapy rather than art...

...Standards drop lower all the time...

...Further, it does almost nothing to encourage new operatic writing...

...today many of them are initiates at the age of twelve and connoisseurs and sophisticates at sixteen...

...Prime Minister Nehru told Martha Graham that her "dancing and artistry will do more than all the planes and dollars in gaining understanding for the United States in India...

...But, of course, it is not...

...This leads to the vagrant speculation that all those community drama and musical societies may not be evidence of a cultural awakening at all...

...The result is that there hasn't been a good season for five years—and that was a rare exception...

...We are an affluent society, and as it is with individuals, so it is with nations—cultural fever is ignited when there is money to burn...

...On a more modest scale it is possible to give a painting, at a nicely inflated price, to a museum, which will, in turn, allow you to hang it on your wall until you die—as handsome a tax dodge as one can display...

...They play beautifully, the best of them, but they refuse to take any responsibility for the encouragement of the new...

...No consideration of the alleged cultural revolution of our time should, however, content itself with a wisecrack about amateur theatricals and leave the qualitative questions about the nature of that revolution to be answered by such ambivalent standards as individual taste or patriotic necessity...

...And every American family is averaging close to six hours a day huddled around the television set...

...Now, at long last, it seems that we have found a use for culture...

...with culture as with everything else they undertake, Americans have to have more of it than anybody else...

...Most of the professional theater in this country, for instance, is underwritten by individuals who would, for tax reasons, be happy to lose rather than make money on their investments...

...The umpty-thousandth production of The Seven Year Itch in a community theater hardly contributes much to the cultural enhancement of the nation, but it probably is invaluable in helping participants from going stir-crazy in our pressure-cooker society...

...Fewer still seem equipped . . . to handle ideas with both skill and pleasure...

...It, and its handful of sister institutions (San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago) prefer to remount the works of another age and to leave the experimentation to colleges and to the New York City Center which, with foundation help, has proved that there are good new works and some kind of audience for them...

...One must wonder if the coal miner in West Virginia is devoting much of his unemployment compensation to ballet tickets...

...The needle has been stuck on abstract expressionism for a decade now and schmeerkunst, which has an ideational content of zero but which is dear to the cult of feeling (a last refuge for the art patron too lazy to learn anything), rules the roost...

...The experts trace some of the apparent growth in cultural activity to the increased leisure-time available to Americans...

...In the long run this will serve art badly (and perhaps the nation as well...

...The established novelist will be lucky to sell 5,000 copies...

...Mason W. Gross, the president of Rutgers University, summed up the need for a fresh attitude toward the arts when he wrote: "No matter what great and significant things have been said in the past, and no matter what tremendous significance they may have for contemporary man, it is still a vital necessity for us today to say something for ourselves, to express what seems to us to be of great significance in our own experience...

...But no one has yet been able to debate good taste into being, to legislate an appreciation for high culture...

...We know that the media of mass culture are doing poorly intellectually and artistically...

...This is not the place to discuss the withdrawal of the serious artist from the democratic dialogue of our times...

...These areas are subject to rational debate, discussion, and persuasion...

...They cannot believe that the subjects dear to their hearts bore or repel or overtax the capacities of their fellow citizens...

...With a population double that of 1900, it is no wonder that we are selling more tickets to concerts than we used to...

...So, the final conclusion about the cultural explosion must be that the number of the minority interested in high culture has grown as the population has grown and that, as a result of this general growth, it is now economically feasible for communities to build cultural centers to house their interests and for certain businesses to cater to them...

...The first novelist cannot reasonably expect an advance of more than $1,000 or sales of more than 700 copies at the outside...

...It is the upsurge of cultural nationalism on the part of intellectuals and middlebrows alike which is the cause of all the flapdoodle about the cultural explosion...

...Another way of saying the same thing is to note that the hard work of building a society is finished—that we now have time to concentrate on the fringe benefits of civilization...

...That is the real America...

...In less prosperous England, fifty-five per cent of the population has a book going at any given moment...

...One can safely state that the torpid majority in any country will be satisfied to spend its leisure on backyard barbecues (or their equivalent) until kingdom come and that the energetic minority will attempt to broaden its horizons...

...Suddenly," as Leonard Bernstein recently exclaimed, "there are mass markets...

...Much of the so-called cultural explosion— or at least the excitement surrounding it—stems from the frenzied activity of our intellectuals and middlebrows to prove that the United States does have something besides gangster films, quiz shows, and Roy Rogers to offer the world...

...With the wonders of atomic energy and automation barely tapped, we stand at the beginning rather than at the end of a trend to more and more leisure time for the individual...

...It should be apparent to the most casual viewer that the voice of high culture is a small one indeed when compared to the voice of mass culture, and that brings me to an embarrassing business...

...the true voice of America is the Philadelphia orchestra or Marian Anderson or Martha Graham or Frank Lloyd Wright or Saul Bellow or Jackson Pollack...

...Life, which likes to put such matters into sweeping historical perspective (and which tends to regard culture and free enterprise as interchangeable verities), put the whole business in round, ringing terms: "Like great cultural explosions of the past, Hellenic Greece, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, etc., it is the fruit of wealth and leisure—but with the vast difference that America's wealth and leisure are shared by all its citizens to a degree hitherto unknown in the world...

...Intellectuals seem unable to reconcile themselves to the fact that their hunger for more news, better plays, more serious debate, deeper involvement in ideas is not a characteristic of the many...

...Intellectually, alas, women are conservative, passive, and unadventurous...

...We now spend more money for concert admissions than we do for baseball tickets, and we spend as much for records and hi-fi equipment as we do on all spectator sports...

...As Clifton Fadiman has put it, "It doesn't take a psychologist to predict that if we try to fill . . . leisure time by putting a small white ball in a slightly larger hole or gawking at television crooners, we will as a people go quietly or noisily nuts...

...Theatrically, the nation is even more moribund...

...We are ramming science down the throats of our youth because we seem to need more scientists to compete with our enemies...

...By 1975 the majority of us may well be on a four day work week...

...If we take as the primary standard of a culture's vitality its interest in the new, in the restatement in contemporary terms of the great values of art, it seems apparent that our minority of torch bearers are woefully remiss...

...The truly vital works which penetrate the American theater's curtain of irrelevancy come from Europe...

...We are insistent on the point...

...Somehow, it seems perverse to encourage it simply because it is politically useful...

...This is nothing to be ashamed of...

...That is the influence of the cold war...

...In the Nineteenth Century the question that concerned the best minds was achieving economic democracy—and we answered that, too...

...Only one-seventh of the books published each year are novels and poetry...

...No society in history has ever had a majority for high culture...

...In a nation of 180 million this is hardly renaissancelevel book buying...

...So it seems fair to state that we still have in America a conservative, passive, unadventurous, and feminine high culture...

...Listen, we seem to cry, hear that thin piping sound rising clear and bell-like over the cacophony of the mass society...

...But art, to borrow Archibald MacLeish's phrase, "should not mean, but be...

...In the Twentieth Century, serious thinkers firmly believe that the main challenge to the United States is the achievement of cultural democracy—but that still remains to be answered...

...To argue otherwise is to argue against all the experience of history...

...We can only note, as Ortega did thirty years ago, that this is a world-wide trend and one which has been in process since the turn of the century...

...This widespread attitude is hardly symptomatic of a lively, engaged attitude toward culture on the higher levels...

...One has to agree with Leo Rosten, who states that "relatively few people in any society have reasonably good taste or care deeply about ideas...

...The situation of the writer in America is equally wretched...

...Until then, let it merely be recorded that interest in the arts is expanding just like everything else in an expanding nation—and that all the talk about the cultural revolution sounds a bit of a fraud...

...But it is not necessary to go so far as the late Bernard DeVoto who declared that "a generation ago most Americans were musical illiterates...

...our high culture speaks with a lisp...

...The real question is: how adventurous will the minority be in its pursuit of the finer things...

...What is peculiarly American is the attempt to seek rapprochement between high and low culture, often to confuse the one with the other...

...The same criticism can be leveled at the symphony orchestras of the nation...

...America was founded on Utopian intellectual premises, and it was able, through the years, to make truly remarkable progress toward political and economic democracy...

...The only trouble with the cultural exchange business is at home...

...they wait a long time before acquiring a taste for new artistic morsels...

...Americans are spending more time on second, part-time jobs than they are in our theaters and concert rooms...

...Since the $2.5 million we spend every year on such programs roughly approximates the cost of a single ICBM, we are probably wise to continue—and even expand—the program, despite the pressing needs of certain places for a decent diet before they can fully appreciate the Boston symphony orchestra...

...In addition, the tax laws encourage a good deal of indiscriminate cultural spending...

...If it does not, then democracy stands indicted as a failure, unable to meet the last of the three goals which Eric Larrabee listed...

...Of those 2,000 or so volumes, more than half will be aimed at the popular market or Hollywood...

...If there has been a growth in the percentage of the population interested in high art (as opposed to a growth in the raw numerical strength of the art patrons), it can be attributed to socio-economic causes, not to a sudden upsurge in an Athenian devotion to the muses...

...Is he as much of an art patron as the groundling in the pit of the Globe theater...

...And I might also note that since the Russians are playing the cultural game for all it is worth, we can ill-afford to let them exclusively occupy the best theaters in the uncommitted capitals of the world...

...It is true that there is "an awful lot" of culture around these days— but an awful lot of people are around, too...

...With "the exception of a few college campuses, new plays are presented only in New York and only in a theater dominated by the expense account trade and by the theater party bookers...

...It is its own reward...

...There are now 5,000 community theaters in this country, housing a quarter of a million amateur theatrical societies...

...Culturally, we are, as a nation, getting more bang for the buck— and are spending more bucks—than any nation in history...

...In general, the majority of culture vultures hang back from the avant-garde feast...

...But how much of it do we really devote to improving our minds...

...Eric Larrabee offers a much sounder historical perspective than that of Life's editors...

...Historically, the American has regarded culture as a frippery, nice enough to have around if the ladies like it, but of little practical use to anyone...

...Thirty million Americans play musical instruments, and the dollar volume of the musical instrument industry has grown to five times its pre-war level, as have sales of painter's supplies...

...Where once there were fewer than 100 symphony orchestras in the land, last year there were 1,142 of them— more than half the world's total— sawing away in towns big and small...

...These factors put a premium on entertainment for the tired businessman and the tired clubwoman...

...the cool-eyed commercial promoters of artistic enterprises are convinced that they have latched on to a very good thing indeed...

...In the Eighteenth Century the question that absorbed the thinking of the best minds in the United States was the achievement of political democracy—and we answered it...

...Artistically, it is hard to find, these days, a real American voice...

...Well, only seventeen per cent of us are reading a book—any book—at this moment...

...This, as any working musician will tell you, is at best only partially true...

...nearly all of us have been struck in some vital part of our consciousness by the shrapnel sent flying by the explosion...

...Can a mass society ever, inindeed, produce a cultural flowering comparable to that of a small, closed society in which high art is the handmaiden of a tiny elite group, superbly educated by comparison to the surrounding mass...