Alto bv ERIC HOBSBAWM

LaboLl\ Tan;ns Point

rh. Ag. oJKeroruttar

Cartam Sptzg (with ceorg€ Rude)

TheAsc of Ca?;tol
Wotkd'
Tte Ase of Enpne
Nanns andNattonal*n
rte Jazz Scexe

A Division of Rindoln Hou6e, Inc, Ne$'Yor&


C HAPTER S E V E NT E E N
The Azsant-gardeDies-
The Arts After 1950
Art as an investm€ntis a conceptionsc.rcely older than the qrly
1950s.
-G. Reitlinser, The E non'csof Taste,vol. 2 ( 1982,p. 14)
The grear big whne goods, the thinss that kep our economy
going-refrigerators, stores, all the things ttut used to be porcelain
and white thcy're now tinted.'lhis is nes. There\ pop art thrt
soesalons with them.Verynice.M.ndrake the Nhgician conins off
rhe $ill rr \ou .s \ou orlenvour rcfnger,rorro ger \nu. n'rnge iun e.
-Studs Terl€|, Drctjr,r Strrt: Anqna $967, p.211)
I conscripts aseinst their comm{ders' milirary coup, ba.use soldiers
It is rh€ practiceof histo.ians-including this one to treat the dcvelop
ment of the aits, howeverobviousand profound their roots in soriett, as
i! some qay sepdableflom their contempor.ry ontexr, as a bnnch or
type of human activity subicct to its own rulcs, and capableof being
judged &cordingly.Yet io the era of the most ielolutionary transaorma-
tions of hunan life s f,r record€d,elen this .ncient and convenient
principle of structurins a historical survey bccomesincrcasinglyunrcal
Not only bec.us€the boundlry betveen wh,t is and is not classifixble.s
"art," "cr€ation" or artific€ b€c ne increasingly hlzy, or even disap
p€aredalrogether,or becausean influentbl schoolof literarl critics at Ih.
Itl lc siir/d thought it inpossiblc, irrelevant and undemocratic to decidc
shether Shakespeare's Macbeth \\rs better or sorse thn Banaan. Ir
ras also becauscthe forcesdetefmining what happenedwithin the ails,
or what old-fishioned obseNers hale called bt that nme, rverc
"ould
The Aaart-ea e Dies The Aftt,4[tet l9SA 501
ov€rwhelningly esog€nous.As misht have b€en expect€d in m en ofex-
t &rdinary techno-scientific revolution, rhey w€r€ predominandy rechno-
logical.
T€chnology revolutionized the aft mo6t obriously by making them
ornnipresent. Radio had dready brought soundFwords and music-itrto
most households in the developed world, .Dd continued its peneration of
th€ brckward world. But what mde it universal las the hansistor, which
mad€ it both small rnd potuble, and the lorylife electic battery which
mrd€ it independent of omcial (i.e. mainly urbm) nenvorks of €l€dric
power. The gr nophone or record player was already mcient, and,
though technicdly improved, remain€d comp rtively cumbersome. The
lons pltying record (1948),which esrablhheditself rlpidly ;n the 1950s
(Guiness, 1984, p 193) benefited the lovers of classicrl music, whose
compositions, unlike those of popular music, had rarely rried to k@p
within the three-or fiye minute limit of the 78 rpm disg but wh!
mad€ self-chos€n music g€nuinely transportable was the rape-c.ssert€,
playable on the incrersingly snall ad porhbl€ and battery pwered
recorder/players, which swpt the wo.ld in rhe 1970s ud had the addi-
donal advantageof b€ing readily copied. By rhe 1980s rnusic coutd be
everyvherc: prirately acconpDying ev€ry possible .ctivity through elr-
phones attached to pock€t-sized d€vices pioneered (as so often) by rh€
Japanes€,or projected only too publicly from the large portable ,,ghette
blasters" (for loudsperkers had not y€t b€en successfully miniaturiz€d).
This technolosical revolution had political as well as altural conse-
quenc€s. In 1961 Pr€sident d€ Gulle appeled suc€essfully to Fr€nch
cotrld her hin on portableradios.In.he 1970sthe sp€cchesofAyaroll.h
Khoneini, qiled leader of the futur€ Iranian r€volution, wer€ .eadily
transpo.ted into lran, copi€d and difTus€d.
Television n€ver becameas readily portable as radio----or at l€ast it losr
fii more by reduction thm sound-bur it domesricated rhe rnovins
inage. Mor€ov€r while a TV set remained a far more eipensive and
physimlly clumsy device thln a radio seq ir soon became alnost univer-
sally and constantly accessibl€€ven to the poor in som€ b.ckwrd coun-
tries, wherever an urb.n idfrastru€ture exist€d. In the 1980ssome 80 p€r
cent of the population of a ountry like Brazil had accessto r€levision.
This is nore surprising than rhat in th€ US.A. the new nedi'rm .epl.ced
both rdio md films as the standard form of popular €ntertainment in the
1950s, and in prosp€rous Britain in rlt€ 1960s.The mass dernand for it
s"s overwhelming. In th€ dvanced counrri€s it begu (via the video-
$ssette plaJ€r, which still remained I rlthe. expensirc device) ro brins
5t)Z Thc Laadshde
thc whole range of the filmed image into the domestic smatl scre€n.
while rhe repertoire produced for th€ big scre€n g€nerdly sufT€redfrom
being niniaturizcd, thc VCR hd the adlantageof giving the viewer a
theor€tically almost unlimited .hoice of what to se and wh€n to s€e it.
With the spred of doncstic comput€rs, the small screen seemedabout to
becomethe individual'smaior visuallink with the outsid€world.
Yet technologynot only made the arts omtripres€nt,but transform€d
rheir perception. tt is bar€ly possible for someon€ who has been brought
up in the lge when electronic rnd mechanicdly s€nerated music is th€
standrrd sound herrd on livc and recordedpop music, when any chjld
can frreze franes, and rcpeata sound or visurl passage as on.e only tex
tual passag€scould be r€-read, when theatrical illusion is as nothins to
what rechnologycan do in televisionconnerci.ls, includins teuing a dra-
matic narrativ€in thirty seconds,to r€capturesimple linearityor sequen
tialiry ofperception in the daysbcfor€nodern high-techrnadeit possible
to move within sconds through th€ full range of avdlable television
channels. Technolofl transforncd the world of the arts, though that of
the popular arts ud €nter$inments earlier and more complet€ly than
th.t of the "high ar$," cspcciallythe more traditional oner.
II
But wh had happcned to these:
At first sight the most striking thing $out the developmentof rhe
bigh a.ts in rhe world rfter the Ag€ of Catastroph€ was ! marked geo-
graphical shift aw'y from the traditional (European) .enhes of elitc
culture, and-given the era of unpr€cedented global prosp€rity-an
enormousrise in th€ financid r€sourcesavailableto support them. Closer
s (ru ri n ),a s $e. hall r ee,{ a s ro p ro v el e s se n c o u ra g i n g .
That "Europe" (by which most p€oplein the W€st between1947and
1989 meant "West€rn Europe") was no longer rhe maior home of the
high $ts b€came a commonplac€ obseriztion. New York prided itself on
ha ns replacedPlris as the centre of the risual arts, by which it mea.r
the art market or th€ place where living rrtists bec.me the highest-priced
commodities. Mor€ sisnificantty, th€ jury of the Nobel Prize fof li(erx
ture, a bod] $'hose sense of politics is usuaUy more interesting than its
literary jrdsmentq besan to take non Europcan literature seriously from
th€ 1960son, having preriously neglected it alrnost completely, eacept for
North America (which cot prizes r€sularly from 1910, when Sinclair
L€wis brcamcns first laureite).No seriousreaderof novelscould, by thc
Th. Aw"t-sunle Diet Tre A^.Uiet 1950 503
1970s,fail to hav€ nade conract wirh the brillimt sch@l of Latin Amer-
ican writ€rs. No serious film-buff could fail ro admire. or ar least to talk
as thoush he or she admired the grearJapanesefilm directorswhq start
ing with Akira Kurosawa(1910 ) in the 1950s,conqueredthe inter-
national filrn fesrivals,or the Bengali Sfyadin Ray (1921-92).Nobody
was surprisedwh€n i! 1986the 6rst sub Saha.anAf.ican, the Niserim
$ble Soyinka(1934 ), sot a N-obelPrize.
Thc shift away from Europe wrs even nore obvious in th€ most visu
ally insistent art, namel) architecture. As we have already seen, rhe mod,
ern movementin .rchitecture had actuallybuih very lirtle benven the
wars. Aftcr the war, when ir (}me into its own, the ,,international strle,'
achi€vedboth its largcst dd most numc.ous monumentsin th€ US.A.,
which deveioped ir furrher and eventuallr minly via the Anericjn,
owned netrvorks of hotels which setded on rhe world from the 1970s on
like spiderwebs, exported r peculiar form of drearn-palace for tr.v€llins
busine."s€recutives and prosperous tourists. In rheir mirst characteristic
v€Eions they $ere casily recogniable by a sorr of c€ntral nave or giant
conser€tory, goerally with indoor tre€q pluts rnd founrainsj ranspar-
cnt elevatorsrisibly sfidinB up th€ insides or outsidesof watlq stass
€verlvhere and theatrical lighring. They were to be for lat€ twcntieth
century bourseois society what the standard opera house had b€en for its
ninctcenth.entury predecessor.But the modern molcmcnr crertcd
equ.lly promircnt monumentselscwhere:l-e tbrbusier (1887-1965)con-
struct€d an entire capitd cirr in India (Cbmdisarh); Oscar Nieneyer
(1907- ) much of anorherin Bnzil (Brllsilia);wHle perhapsthe most
beautiful of the great producs of the modern movement-atso built by
public comission .ather thd privare parlonage or profir-is to be found
in M€xio City, the N ional Museum of Anrhropology(l9tt).
It seemed equally evidenr that rhe old European c€ntres of the .rts
were showing signs of battle-fatigue, with the possible exceprion of ltaly,
where the mood of d fascist sellliber.rion, larsely under comnunist
leadership,inspireda decad€or so of cuhural r€naissa.cewhich made irs
mah intcrnrtional impacr through thc ltrlian ..neo rellist" films. The
French visualarts did not maintainthe rcputationofrhe inter-war school
of Paris, which was in its€lf litrle more than an afterslov of rhe er3 before
1914.The major reputationsof French fiction writers w€re intellcctual
rather thrn fiterary: as inventorsof gimmicts (like rhe.n\uuhu tuna'l'
of the 1950smd 1960s)or as nofl-fictionwrit€rs (likeJ.,P Sartrc),rathcr
than for th€ir creativework. Ilad any posFl945.,seriouf' French novel-
ist €stablishedany irternatioml reputarionas such by the 1970s?Proba
bly not. The British lrtistic scen€had beenconsiderablvliveli€r not least

becauseLondon rfter 1950 transformeditself into one of th€ world's
naior centres for musiol .nd theatriql p€rformancej and also produc€d
a handful of avant sarde architects whose adventurous projEts s.ined
them more fame abroad-in Paris or Stuttsart-than at home. Neverth€-
less, if post Second World War Britain occupi€d r les n.rsitral plee in
the Western European arts than benre€n the wars, its record in the field
where th€ country had always be€n stron5 litenture, w.s not p$ticularly
impressive.ln poetry the post-war writers of litd€ Ireland could mor€
than hold their own against th€ UK. As for Fcder.l Germany, the con
trast between rhar country\ resources and achievements, and inde€d be-
twe€n its glorious Wein.r past and its Bonn present, was striking. It was
not entirely €rplained by the disastrous €ffects and dter effects of the
twelve Hitler years. It is significant that in the 6fty posFwar years severrl
of the best talents adiv€ in W€st G€rnan literature wer€ not nativ€s but
immigrants from further east (Celan, Grass and variousincomers from
the GDR).
Germanx ofcourse, wasdirided between19,15and 1990.The contrast
bctween the two parts one militantly democraticliberal, marke.
orient€dnd Wcst€rn,the orher a texrbookversionofconnunist centril
ization-illust.at€s a curious asp@tof the migratio! of high culture: its
relative flowcring under communism, at leat 4t celtlin periods. This
plaitrly doesnot .pply to all arts, nor, of course,to sstes under the iron
heel of a senuinelymurderousdictatorsh;p,like Stalin'sand Mao's, or of
lessermesaiomniac tyrannies,lite Ceausescu's in Romania(1961 89) or
Kin Il Suns's ir North Korea (1945-1991).
Moreover, insofar as ffts dep€nd€d upon public, i.e. central govern
metrt, p ronrye, the standard dictatorial preference for pompous gigan
tism reducedthe artists' choice,as did the ofncial insistenceon a sort of
upbeit sentimentalmythologyknown as "socialistrealism." It is possible
th.t the wide open spa.eslined with ns-Vicrorian rowersso characteris
tic of rhe 1950smay on€ day 6nd adnirerrene 6inks of Snolensk
Squde in Moscow-but the discovery of their mhit€ctural merits musl
be left to the futu.e. On the other hand it must be dmitt€d that, wherc
communist governmentsdid not insist on t€lling rtists eracd' what to
dq their generosityin subsidisingcultur.l activiries(or, as oth€rs might
put it, their defectivesenseofaccountancJ)was h€lpful. It is presumabl)
not an accid€nt that the \l'est imported the typical avant-gardeopera pro
duc€r of the 1980sfrom EastBerlin.
Th€ U.S.S.R.rernainedcukurally fallow,at leastin conparisonwnh its
pre l9l7 slori€sud eventhe fetmentof the 1920s,exceptperhapsfor thc
writing of poetry,the art most capableof being practisedin prilzte and
Ihe AuiFga/de D$ The At^ Aftet l95A 5O5
the on€ wher€ the great twentierh century Russian rndirion mainrained
its continuity b3st lfter l9l7-Akhmatova (1889-1966), Tsverayeia
(1892-1941), Pdternak (1890-1960), BIok (1880-1921), Ma)"kovstry
(1893 1930), Brods*y (1940 ), Voznes€nsky(1933- ), Akhm.dutina
(193?- ). Its visurl {ts suffered particularly from rhe combindion of a
risid orthodoxn both ideological, aesthetic and insdrudonal, ed total
;solation from the rest of the world. The passionarecultural national;sm
which begln to emerge in pirts ot the US.S.R. during rhe Brezhnev
period--orthodox and Slavophil in Russia (Solzh€nitsyn (1918- ),
nythic4l-medievalist in Arnenia (e.g. in rhe films of Sergei Parrdianov
(1924- Fdcrived lnlgely from the f:lcr rhat thos€ who rejected any-
thing recommended by the system and the p{ty, .s so many intelledu.ls
did, had no other tr:ditions to dnw on bur rh€ locat cons€narive ones.
Moreover, the int€llecturls in the U.S.S.R. were spectacularly isohred not
only frcm ihe system of governm€nt but also from the bulk of ordinary
Soviet citizens whq in som€ obscure wa}, acc€pted irs t€girimacy and ad
justed to the only life th€y kneq and which, in the 1960sand 1970s,wa
actually improvins quite noticeabl)aThey hated the rulers and despised
the .uled, even when (lile the n€o-Slavophils) rhey idealized the Russian
soul in the shlpe of a Russian p€asmt who no longer qisred. It was nor a
good armosph€re for the crearive arrist, and the dissolurion of rhe appa-
ratus of int€ll€ctual coerdon, paradoxically,turned td€nts from ca€ation to
agitition. The Solzhenitsyn who is likely to sunive as i maior rwenticrh
c€ntury writer is thc otr€ who still had to preach by writing novels (,4
Dat the L'ft af lxan Deniouch, Tne Cancet ttlarl) bec se he as yer
l&[ed'h the fr€edom to w;te sermons md historic.l d€nunciations.
The sku3tionin C,mmunist Chim until the lat€ 1970swas dominated
by ruthlessr€pression,underlinedby mre momentdy relaxation(,'ler a
hundred flow€rs bloom") which served to identify dre victims ofrhe next
pursEs. The regime of Mao Tse-tung r€ach€d its climax in t]te .,Cultural
R€voludon" of 1966-76, a campaign againsr culture, educarion and int€l
ligence without ptuallel in rwenri€th-centuryhisrory. lt virrudly shut
down s4ond.ry and univcBity cducation for r€n )c,rs, brougfit tbe prac
de of (West€rn) cl6sical and orher nusic to r hak, wherc ne€essaryby
destroying its instrumenrq and reduced the national repertoire of st38e
and 6lm to half a dozen potiticllly correct pieces (as judscd br th€ crear
Hclnsman's wife, once a second-rank Shanshai film actress), which wer€
€ndlessly repe.ted. civ€n both riis experience and the ancient Chinese
trdition of inposins orthodoxx which w.s modified bur not $mdoned
j! the post-Mao era, the tight shining our of Connunist China in the

On the other hand, creativity nourish€d under thc comnunist regimes
of ltastern Europe, at l€ast one orrhodoritr was even slightly relaxed, ,s
happenedduring de-Sialinization.The filn indusrry i' Poland.Czecho
slorEkiaand Hungarx hitherto nor much hord ofeven locallx bursr inro
unexpected bloom from the late fifties on, md for I while b€cameone of
ihe most distinguishedsourcesof intcrestingmoviesanywhere.Until the
collapseof cornmunism,which also entdl€d the collapseof the mecha-
nisms for cultural producrionitr the countriescon@m€d,eventhe reviul
of.epression (afrer 1968in Czechoslov*ia,after 1980in Poland)did nor
halt it, thoush the rlrher promisios starr of the Easrc€rmrn fitm indus
tlr in the earl! 1950shad been brought to a stop by political authorir].
That an art so dependenton heary srateinvestmentshoujd have flour-
ish€d #tistic.lll' under connunist redmes h mor€ surprising than that
creative literature should, for, dter all, eren under intolerant govern-
ments, books can be wrirten "for the botrom draw€.,' or for circles of
friends.*Ho$ever narrow the public for which they originaltywrote, sev-
e.al of th€ writers son international admhation-thc East cermans. who
produced substantiallymore inrerestingralent thrn rhe prosperousFed-
cral Republic,and rhe C,echs of the 1960swhosewritings only reachcd
thc West via int€rnal md externalemigrationafter 1968.
What all thesetalenrshad in comon w.s somethinEthat few write.s
and 6h-mrteF in rhe developeJmrrter economr, cnyolcd,and t[esr-
€rn rheatre folk (a group gilrn to uncharacterhticpolitical radicalism
dating back, in the U.S.A. and Brirain, ro the 1930s)dre.med abour:thc
s€nseofb€in8 neededby their public. lndeed, in the absenceof r€.1 pol
itics and a free press!practitionersof rh€ arts were rhe or, on6 who
spoke for whlt their people, or at lcast the educared lmong them, thoughi
and fe l . Ther e f c c ling\ s e re n o t c o n n n e d ro rrh s tr i n comnuni sr
regimes, but in orher r€gim€s where intellectuals wefe at odds wirh thc
prevalent political system, afld, though nor torally unrest.icted, were free
enoush to expressthemsch'esin public. Aparthcid ;n South Afric. in
spired its adversaries to more good literature rhan hd ome out of that
subcontinent before. That mosr Latin American inrellecruahsouth of
M€xico bet$een the 1950sand tbe 1990s*cre lilely! at some point nr
their lives, to b€ pofitical refugees,;s not irrelevanr to the cultural
achielemcntsof that part of the Westernhenisphere.The samewas truc
of Turkish intellectuals.
*HNe!c., thc
Focessesof coFli.g remiined bborio!\ sinc€no i€ch-
nologylaterrhm the manurltypewritennd arbon 'ncredibly
prpe! wereavaihble,For pol'ti
c rasons the pre ?.r.r/,*a comhunii sorld did nor usethe X€rox.
The Aunt ga e Dies The *ts Afiet 1950 507
Neverth€l€ss,thcre was more to the ambiguous nNerins of some arts in
East€rn Eurcpe thm their function as a tole.at€d opposition- Most of rheir
youns€r practitioners had been inspired by th€ hope that their counrries,
even under unsatisfactory regimes, would in someway e er ! new €ra aft€r
th€ horrcrs of wartimei some,more than cared to be reminded of it. had ac-
tually f€lt the wind of utopia in th€ sails of youth, .r leasr in the firsr few
pGrwar years. A few ctntinued to b€ inspired by rheir times: Ismail
Kadar6 (1930- ), perh.ps th€ first Albanian novelist to make a mnrk on
the outside world, becamethe mouth piece not so much of Enver Hoxhr's
hardline regirne $ of a small mount in country which, under comunisn,
won a piac€ in the world for ihe lirst timc (he emisnted in 1990). Most of
the others sooner or later moved into varying degreesof opposition yet,
ofren enoush, reiecting the only alrernative ofT€redto th€m (wh€th€r across
the West Cerman border or by Rdio Fr€e Europe), in a world of bin&y
and mutually exclusiv€ opposites.And even where, &sin Poland, r€j€ction
of the existing regime becam€ total, all but the younscst knew enoush
about th€i country's history since 19,15to pick shadesofsrey aswell as rhe
propagandist's blacl and shite. Thrt is what giv€sa rragic dim€nsion ro the
Iilms of Andrz€i wajda (192G ), their mbisuity to the Czech film-
nak€rs ofthe 1960s,then in their thirties, .nd the writers of the GDR*
Ch.h$ lvolf (1929 ), Heiner Miiller (1929 ) iisillusioned but nor
oblivious of d,eir dreams.
Pddoxi(:lln artists .nd intellectuals in both th€ (socialist) Scond
World ind the adious parts of the Third World €nio}td both presdse
and rehive prosperitv and privilege, at l€ast betw€en bours of persecu-
tion. In thc s@ialisr world rhey might b! mong the richest ciriz€ns and
enioy that rarcst of all freedomsin those collectiveprison-houses,the
right to travel abroad, or even to have accessto foreig! literature. Under
socialism their political inlluenc€ was zerq but in rhe vadous third qorlds
(md, fter the frll of cornmunism, briefly in rh€ former world of "really
existins socialism") being an intell€ctu or ever an artist was a public
$see.In hrin Americaleadingwriters, almosrirrespectiveof th€ir poliF
ic opinions, could expect diplomatic posts, prcfer$ly in Paiis, where
th€ location of UNESCO gave eich counrry that wanted to sveral
chanc€s to ptace citizens in rhe neighbourhood of l,€ft Brnk cafes. Pro
f€ssors had ahvays exp€cted spells as cabinct ministersJ preferably of
economics, but the fashion of th€ l.te 1980s for persons connecred with
.he arts to stand as pr€sidential candidrtes (as r sood novelist did in
P€ru), or actually to become presidents (as in posr-connunisr Czechosle
i?kia and Lithuania) seemed n€q rhough ;t had precedents in errtier
times among new srites, borh European and Africm, which we.e lik€ly to
 The,4xanF{ad. Dier-l'he A^ Aftu tgja 509
Sire prominenccro those few of their cjtizcns who werc known $road. a more valu.ble collateral for bank loans. .nd raise the deater's future
ie. mo st l ilelr c on( r r pr a n i \l s rs
, In Ia l q P o h n d . F re n (h ooers.as l n profits. As it happens,both were disappointedrMr Bond of perth wenr
S cn e g a lo. r danc er sas, in b u i n e a 5 ri tl . n o re ts u d rmrrrrl poersan.t
blnlrupt and .he specul.tivearr boom collapsedin the €arty 1990s_
political non-srartersin most devetopedWestern coun
The relation between money and the arts is always anbisuous. Ir is far
trres under any &cumstanccs,elen in int€llecrually-minded ones.dceDr from clear that the maior .chievements of the arrs in the second hdf of
perh a p \.s poenr ial \ . t ini s re rso f C u l ru re { An d re \4 a l rau\ i n Franc,
.he century Ned much to it; excepr in architecrure, where, on rhe s.hole.
Jorse Se'nprnn in Spain). big is beurilul. or. ar ant rrre. morc liteh ro gcr inro lhe gurdebootsOn
The public and prilare resourcesdeloted ro the aris w€rc inevirrbly
the other hand, another kind of economic deyeiopment uEquestionably
tar gr€aterthan beforein an cra of unprccedenredprosperirl...lhus elen
affected most of rhe arts profoundly; their integration inro a€denic life.
the Brirish govemment,.e!er in thc forefront of public patron.ge,spenr
in the insdtutions of superior educ*ion whose eir.aordinary €rpansion
well o!€r {l biuion sterlins on the arts in the late 1980s,whereasin 1939
we hav€ notjed €lsewher€ (chapter l0). This deveioprnenr was borh
it had b€en {900,000 (rrtdn: An OIJiclrt Haidbooh, tg6t, p. zZ2: tggl,
generrl :nd specifis Spqkirg g€ner.lly, rh€ decisive developm€nr of
p 426). Privrte patronase was less imporrant, exc€pt in rh€ US.A., lvhere
twertieth-century cultur€, th€ ris€ of a rcvolurionarl popular enrerrain
billionaires,encouragedbl suirablefiscal conccsions!supporrededuca
ment industry geared to rhe mass market, reduced the traditional forms
tion, learningand culture on a more munificenrscde thrn anlwh€re ehe.
of high art to elire gh€troes5and fron the middle of the century their in-
pardy out of a genu;nerypreciationofthe hisher things in life, especially
habit nts were essentially people who had enjoyed a hisher educario,r.
amonghrst-generationtlcoons; pardr bccause,in the absenceof a formal
The public of rheatreand opera, rhe readersof their country,s lit€rary
social hierarchli whar mighr be €dled Medici st,tus was the nexr best
classicsand the sort of poetry and prose taken scriously by th€ criricsJ the
thin& Inc.elsingly the big spendersdid not merell. donlte rheir colle._
visi.ors to museumsand art sdlerjes b€longedoverwheiningly to those
trons to nahonalor civic galleries(as in the past),bur ;nsistedon found
$ho had at least@mplet€dsecondaryeducation +xc€pt in th€ socjalist
ing their o$t museurns mm€d after rh€mselves, or at least rheir own
world wher€ th€ pront-maximizing entertainment indusrry \!rs Lept at
vings or sectorsof museumsin vhich their own collectionswcre Dre
. enrcdrn rh e f or n lar ddo$ n b ] th e tro { n e rs ,n d d o n o A . bay until, aft€r its fall, ir lv.s no long€r Lept at bay. The conmon cul
ture of any late rwentieth{enru.l urbanized countrr was based on the
As for the ar m*ket, from the 1950son ir discoreredrhat almost hatf
mass efltertainmenr industry -cinemq rrdiq tele sion, pop rnusic in
a century of depressionwas liirins Prices,especiallyof French Impres,
which the elite sh ed, certainly from the niumph of rock nusic on-
s ion i \ts.p os F lm pr c $ionis aa n d rh c m o " t e mi n c D rp a d e i n carl t mod
wa.ds, and to which intellectuals no doubt glve a highbrN twisr ro
emists, rose into the sty, until in the l9?0s the internatioml arr mdket.
makc it suitable for elite taste. B€yond this, s€sregation was inoeasingly
trhosclmat'on shified fir$ ro London rnd rh<n ro \e$ yort. had eourllcd
complete, for the bull of the public ro which the mass market indusrry
r he al l -ri mcr ec or ds( r n r eatre rm\j o f rh e { g e o r E m p i rc ,rnd i n rhc rJd
appeiled onl) encounrekd b) occasionatic,idenr, rtrc genre. thai
bull market of the 1980ssored beyondrhen. The price of Impression
high-culture bulIs raved about, as wh€n a Puccini ari, suns by pwarotti
Ists .nd post-Impressionisls muhiplied twentl-rhr€e fold betwecn 1975
found;r\el fas$ci aredw i rh rhc \ \ or ld So. cerCup in t qeu. ; r ; hen b ef
and 1989(Sothebx 1992).Howei€r,comparisonswirh earli€rperiodswere
Lhemesfrom Handel or Bach appearrd incognir; in .ummer.
henceforrhimpossible.True, rhc tuh srilt cott(red old m"ner. as a rul.. 'etevision
ci.ls. If one did rct wmr rc join rhc m;ddl€ chssesotrc di.t not bother
p relcrri n tsold m as r c r snes . mo n e t Bo i n gfo r n o \e tr\ b u t i nerea.i ngty about seeinsShak€sp€are plays.Conversel);if one did, the mosr obvious
arGpurchasersbought for investmenr,as once men had boueht sDreula
m€ans being to pass the requisite exarns at secondary school. one could
rt \ e g o u mi ning r har e" T . he Bfl ri s hR a i l p e n s i o n .fu n d . u hrch ron tht not aloid seeing them: they wer€ the subiect of cxaminations. In dtreJne
besrrdvice) made r lor ul moner out of arr. crnnor bl rhoushr of 6 Jn
cases,of which class-divided Britain was a notable dmptq newsp.pers
art lo1rr, and the ide,l-typicalart transacrionof the late 1980swasone in
addressedresFctively to the educated and the uneducat€d virtualty in-
$.hich a Wes.eh Australianilstant tycoon bought a Van cogh for
{31 hrbned diffe.ent universcs.
million, a large part of which had beenl€nt him by rh€ auctioneers,both
More specifically, rh€ extraordinrrJ expansion of higher education
prcsumablyhoping for furrher price riss which sould mak€th€ picrure
incrcasingly provided employm€nt, and constitrted th€ market for men

and women with inadequate commercitl appeal. This was mosr dranrti
cally exenplified in lie.ature. Poets taught, or at l€ast were resident at
colleges.In sone countriesth€ occupatiotrofnovelist and professoro!er-
lapped to such an eitent thrt an entirely new genre rppsrcd in th€ 1960s
and, sinc€ vast nmbers of pot€ntial readen w€re familiar sith the mi
lieu, flourished: the canpus novel which, apfft from th€ usual subi€cF
matter of fiction, tbe relation betwen the sexes, dealt with mafters of
nore esoteric ifterest, sr.rchas rcademic exchanger international collo
quia, university gossipand the peculiaritiesof students.More dmger-
ouslx academicdenand encourryed th€ production of crearivewriting
that lent itself to s€minar dissection, and therefore benefited by conpl€x
ity, if not inonpr€hensibility, following the eranple of the sreat James
Jolce, whose llter work had as many commentators as genuine reders.
Pocts wrotc for other poets, or for students c{pected to discuss th€ir
works. Protected by acadenic salari€s,graflts md obligaro'y re.dins lisN,
the non commercid creativearts could hope, if not nccessarilyto flour-
ish, then .t leastto survive in confort. Alas, anotherby-product of the
growth of academiaundermined their position, for the glossatorsand
scholiastsmade thenselvesindependentof their subi€ctbr claiming that
the text was only rnhatthe readermade of ir. The critic who intcrpretcd
Flaubert, thcy egucd, rv6 as much the cretor of Madame Bovary as the
.uthot perhaps sincc that novcl survivedonly through othes'r€adings,
mainly for rcademic purposeHven more than the author. This theory
had lons been hailed by rvanr sarde theatricalproducers(anticipatedby
the actor-managers and film-mosuls of old) for whorn Shakespeareor
Verdi were basically raw material for their own adventurous and preibr-
ably provoc.tirc interpretations.tiumphant though these somctimes
were, they actuallyunderlined lhe grorvingesotcricismof the hiShbros
arts, for they were themselvescomm€ntariesupon and cdtiquesof carlier
interpretations,and not fully comprehensibleexccpt to inithtes. The
fashionspreadevento the populistscnre offilms, wheresophisric,teddi
rectors adrcrtiscd their cinematic erudition to the elite which understood
their allusionswh'le keepins the m&sses(and hopefully the box oin.c)
happy with blood and spern.*
Is it possibleto gless ho{ the cuhural historiesofthc twentv-firstcen
'Th!s Brianderalna\ rr. U,r,!.Lrlr, (1987), ostensibb
a.ousinscops"nd
robbe^ 6lm aboutAI capone\ ChicryoGhoushactuall! t pasticheoi $c odginal
Benre),containsr litenl quotefron Eisensrein's
r/llcrrQ P,r?nh,,, inconprehen
sibleio tll rfto had nor s@ntbc fxmouspass.g€oi ihe pr.m careerinsdo{n ihe
The Axau gurdeDEs The Atts Aljtt 19SA 5tl
tury will6sess th€ arristicrchievementsof the hish arts of the secondhalf
of the twentieth? Obviously nor, but they will hardty f.il ro noticc the de
clinq at le3st regiondly, of characreristic g€nres that had flourished grearty
in th€ neteenth c€nturx dd survived into the first half of rhe rwentieth.
Sculptureis u enmple rhat sprirys ro rnind, ifonly becausethe main ex-
pressionofthis art, the public monumenq rtuallv died out tfter the First
World Wrr, except in dictatorial countries, xhere, by general consenr, qual
ity did not equrl quantiry. It is impossible ro avoid the inpr€ssion tha!
paDting was not wh.t it had b€enevenbetweenthe wrs. At all elrnrs it
would b€ difficult to draw up r Iisr ofpaintcrs of 1950-1990who would be
acceptedas major figures(€.g.worthy ofinclusion h museumsother than
the artisCsown country)companbleto sucha lisr for the intcr {dperiod.
That, we may r€mird ourselves, would have includcd at the very least pi-
casso(1881 1973), Mariss€ (1869-1954),Soutine (1891-1943),Chqall
(1889-1985)and Rouauh (1871 1958) fron the Ecole de parisr Klee
(1879 1940),perhrpstwo or rhreeRussiansand Gern s, and one or rwo
Sp.nirrds and Mexicms. How would :r later twentieth-century list compare
with these,even if it includ€d seleral lsders of rhe Ncw Yort School of
"absFact e{pressio.ists," Francis Bacon and a couple of Germans?
In classical musiq once agrin, the d€cline ;n rh€ old s€.res w$ con
cealedby thc enormousincrc2sein their perfornance,but mainlv ;n rhe
lbrm of a repertoire of dead classics.How many new operas, wr;tten dter
1950, had est$lished rhemselrcsi. rh€ inremational.or ercn lny n:r-
tional, repertoires,which endlesslyrecycledrhe producrsof.omposers of
vhom the youngesthd been born in 1860?Ercept for cernanl and
Britain (Henze, Brittcn and at best rwo or three others). verv few com
posrs elen createdsrand operas.The Americans(e.s. Leonard Bern
stein, 1918-90)prefered rhe l6s fornal genreofthe musical.How many
compos€rs otho than rhe Russians any longer wrore syrnphonics, re
gardedas th€ crown of instruentd achievcmenrin rhe ninereenthcen-
tury?* Musical talent, which continued in plentiful and disringuished
supply, sinply tended ro abandon the traditionnl forrns of expr€ssion,
ev!'n though iheseoverwhelninglydoninated rhc high,a.t market.
A sinilar refear frorn the ninereenrh{cnturl genre is obvious in rhe
novel.Naturally it conrinuedto b€ writren in vast qu.nriries,bought md
read.Yet if ve look for the great nov€lsand rhe great nolelists of the
secondhalf of the centurr. the ones which took an entire societv ol
*ProkoievNrotesven..d Sbosttkolich liftee\ ander€nSrrarinsky sr.1ethree:
bur dUtfi6e belonged,or h.d b€enfbrned in th€ lirst p.t of the entun

historical era as their sub,ed, w€ find th€m outsid€ the central regions of
Western culture-' +xcep!, once agrin, for Russia, where the novel re-sur-
faced,with rhe early Solzhenitsyn,as the naior creativemode of.omins
to terms with the exp€ricnce of Stalinism. We rmy find novels of the
grert tradition in Sidly (Lampedusat The Leol,d/d),in Yugoslavi.(Ivo
Andrit, Mirostav Krieir) .nd Turkel We shdl c€.tainlr find th€m in
htin Am€rica, whose nction, hithe.to untnown outsid€ the .ountries
concemed,captured the literary world from the 1950son. The norel
most unhesitatinglyand instandyrecopized as a masterpieceall oler the
globe came from Colombiq a country that most educated p€opl€ in the
devcloped world had troubl€ even identifying on a nap before it becrme
id€nrilied with cocaine: G.briel Garcia Mirquez's A Hu"dted Yeals o1'
J"/tu/a Perhes the remarkable rise of the J€wish novel in several coun-
tries, notablythe U-S.A. and Israel,reflectsthc cxceptionaltrauma of its
p€ople's€xperienc€under Hirler, sith which, directly or indirectly,Jes
ish writers felt they h.d to come to terms.
Th€ decline of the classicalBenresof hish rrt ,nd literature was
ceftainly not due to lny shortage of talent. For cven if rve know litdc
about the distribution of exceptionel gifts mong humrn beings and its
variation, it is safer to .ssume lhrt rhere are rapid chang€s in the incen-
tivcs to expressthem, or in the ourlets for expressingthem, or in the
cncouragementto do so in some particular manner, rather than in
the qumtity of a\ailable tdent. 'fhere is no good .eason to $sume th.t
Tus.ns today e less talented, or even have a less develop€d r€sthetic
senseth.n in the c€ntury of th€ Florcntin€ Renaissance. T:Jent in tbe
arts abandoned the old ways of seekins cxprcssion because nerv uays
\rtre avail$l€ or attr:rctive, or rewrrding, as when, cvcn bct1vcen the
wars, young avant slrde composers might be t€mpt€d, like Auric and
Britten, to write soundtracksfor films .athq than string quarters.A
great d€al of routine painting and drawing was replac€dby th€ trilrmph
of rhe cm€rq which, to tak€ onc exlmple, t@k over the representation
of fashionalmostcornpletely. The s€ri.l novel, : readya dyins breed bc
lw€en the w:rrs, gave way in the ,ge of television to the scr€en s€rial.
Th€ film, which allowedfar greter scopc for individual creativetalenr
after th€ colhpse of the Holllwood srudio systemof factory production,
and as the mass cinema aodience mehcd into its hom€s to watch t€lefi-
sion and later videq took th€ place onc€ occupied by bolh no\'€l a'd
drama. For every culture lover Nho could fit two pl.ys to thc namcs ol
evcn 6ve living playwrishts,there {ere fifty vho could reel off all lhc
leading rnoviesof a dozen or more film-directors. Nothing was morc
natural thaD this. Onh th€ social status associated$itn old-fashioned
Th. AMtt gaftleDies Th. Aas AfB lt,a 5t3
"high culture" prev€nt€d an €v nore rapid declinc of its .nditiond
Howeve., there *cre two evo more importut facrors which flow un
dermined classisl hish culture. The first was the univ€rsal triunph of
the society of mass consumption. From the 1960s on th€ imases which
accompeied hunan beings in th€ Westem world+d inoeasinsly in
the urbadz€d Third World-ftom birrh to d€ath were rhose advertising
or embodying consumptio' or d€dicated to commercial mass entertain-
nent. The sounds which accompanied urban life, in and ourdoors, wcre
those of commercirl pop music Compar€d ro these thc impad of the
"high arts" on even th€ most "cultured" was occasionalar best, €specially
since the technology-bas€d triumph of sound and imas€ put sev€re pr€s-
sure on sha' hdd been rhe maior medrum lor the conrinuouscrperience
of hish culturg namely the printed word. Excepr for light entertain
ment-mainly Iovestories for women, rhrillers of various kinds for men
and perhaps, in the era of liberalization, some €rotica or pornography-
people who read books seriously for oth€r rhan prof€ssional, educational
or other instructional purposes, were a smallish lninoritl: Though the ed-
ucation.l revolution eipand€d thei nurnbers absolut€il eas€ of r€adins
declined in countries of 6eor€rically univ€rsd literacy, rvh€n print ceased
to b€ the main gate to rh€ world beyond rnouth tcear communication.
After the 1950s even the children of the educated classes in the rich
W6lem *ortd did nor rake ro reading d spontan€ously as their parenrs
The words which domiMted W€stem
Ionser th€ words of holy books, l€t alone of s€cular writers, bur the
bnnd-names of soods or $hatever else could be bousht. They were
printed on T:shirts, .lrached to orh€r grrmenrs lik€ m.gical charrns by
means of which the wearer acquir€d th€ spirirual merit of the (senerally
yoirthful) lifHtyle which these nanes symbolized and promised. The im
ages that b€cime the icons of such s@ieties were those of m$s enter-
ttinment .nd mass consumption: stars and cms. It is nor surprising th.t
in rhe 1950s,in th€ heartlandof consumerdemocracr the le.dins school
of painters abdiqted before image-n*€$ so nuch more pow€rful than
old-fsshioned art. "Pop ArC' (Warhol, Licht€nstein, RNschenbers, Old
€nburg), spent its time reproducins, with as much accuracy and insensi
tiyity as possibl€, the visual trappings of American comm€rcialism: souD
cans, nags, Coca-Crla boftles, Meilyn Monroe.
'A brill,antFrmc.hsociologisr
d.lysed th€ ureofculrure6. clasemdl€rin a
b@k entirledLa Dltttroh (Bourdi€u.1979J.

Negligible as arr (in the ninereenth{enru.y sens€of the rvord), this
fashionnevertheless recognizedthat rhe niumph ofthe nass markerwas.
in some profound ways,brsed on sltisfving rhe spiritu as well $ the
matetal needs of consuners, a facr of which advertisingagencieshad
long beenlaguely a{arc when th€I gearedtheir canpaignsto selling,,not
the steakbut the sizzlg" not soapbut rh€ dream of b€auo! nor tins of
soup but family happiness.What becameincr€asinslt,clear;n the 1950s
was that this had whar cluld be called an aestheticdimension.a Erass-
roorscre a d v r r )oc. c as iona lal rc ri reh u t ma rn t) p ,.s i v e u h n h proJucen
had to comperero suppl)'.Th€ baroqueexc€sses of 1950sD€troir auro-
mob;le desisnhad exactlythis in view; and in the 1960s. few inrellisenr
c rri cs b e g anr o in\ es r igr r es h a r h rd fre \i o u rl ) b e n o \e ru hetmi nsll)t-
missed and rejectedas "commercid" or jusr a€stheticatlynull, namely
what.ctualll attracredmcn and women on the sr.eet (Batrham.t97t).
The older inr€Uectuals, now describedas .,elitist" (a sord
adoptedwith enthusiasrnby rhe 'ncr€asingly
new rrdicatismofthe 1960s),had tooked
down on the nasses whon lhey saw $ passiverecipientsof what big
businesswantcd them to bu{ Yet the 1950sdemonsrraiedmost dramari,
callr throush tbe triumph of rock and-roll, an adol€scents, idion derived
from the self made urban blues of No.th American black shettoes,that
the massesthmselves knei\ ot at l€astleco$ized wh.t they liked. The
recordins indusrl which nade its fortunes from .ock music. did nor
o€ate I€t alone phn n, but took it over from rhe amateurs and sm.ll
sFeet-corneroperatorswho disco\credit. No doubt rock music was cor
rupt€d in rhe proc€ss-'Art" {if rhat was the right word) $as s€en to come
liom the soil rath€r th.n from €xeprional flow€rs growing out of it.
Moreover,as the populismsharedby both the marketand mti<litisr rad-
icalismheld, the import,nr rhing abourir rvasnot to distinguishbet{,een
good and bad, elaborate and simple, but at most between whar app€aled
to more and fes€r people. This did nor leave rnuch space for $e old-
fashionedconceprof the arts.
Yet an el.€nmore poverful force undernined the high arts: the dsrh
of "modernism" which had, sincethe larenineteenth€enturyil€sitimated
th€ practiceof non-urilitadanarrisriccrentionand certainlvhad Drovided
rhe iu:'ificarion lor rhe arusrs , laim to frceaon from ion"nrints In
novation had been its core. On the malosy of science "tt
and technotosy,
"Modernity" tacitlJ assumedthat rrr wrs progressiveand therefore
todry's style was superio. to yest€rday\. It had b€en, by d€finirion, the
of rhe auat-ganlr, a term which enrered critical vocrbularv in the
^rt
1880s, i.e. of minorhies which in rheory l.)oted fo.ward one dry to cap-
tunng rhe maiorit!. bur :n prarric€rere happ) as ver nor ro hate done $
The Atant-sant. Diet-I he A16 Aner 1950 sts
Whatever its specific forn, "modernisn" resred on the rejecrion of nin€,
teenth{entury bourgeois-liberal conventions ;n both society and art. and
on the perceived need to creat€ m dt in some s.ay suited to the rechno-
logiolly and socially revolutionary twentieth cenrury, to which the arts
ud lifestyl€s of queen Victorir, thc Emperor Wiltim and Presidetrr
Theodore Rooseveh were so plainly unsuited (se,lsa of Eutile. chaptet
9). Idcally the two objectives rvent together: Cubism was both a rejation
md oitiqu€ ofvictorian representatiye painting and in altemative ro it,
as well as r coltection of "works of art" by "artists" in its and theii own
right. In practice they did noi havc to coincide, :s the (deliberar€) ntistic
nihilisn of Marc€l Duchamp's urinal and Dada hd d€monstrared long
.go 'ftese were rcr intended to be any kind of art, bur anti-arr. Asain,
ideally the social 1"lues which "modemisr" artists iooked for in the rwen-
tieth century md the ways of expressing these in word, sound, image and
shape should nelt into each oth€r, as they v€ry larsely did in modernist
architecture, which was essentially a styl€ for buildins sociat utopias in
forms allegedly su;ted ro it. On@ again, in practic€ form and substance
we.e not logically coNected. Why, for instance, should L€ Corbusiert
"radi^nt .it\," (ctte ndietsc) consist of high rise buildings wittr flat rofs
rather than pitched ones?
Nevertheless, as w€ hrve seen, in the first half of the centurr ..nod-
€mism" worked, the feeblenessof its th€oretical foundations unnoticed,
the short dist4llce to the limns of development p€.nin€d by its formutas
(€.9. tw€lve-tone music or abstract aro not yet quite traversed, irs fabric
uncracked as y€t by inner contradictions or porertial fissures. Formal
lunt-grrde innmtiotr and social hope were srill wetded toserher by the
experien.r of world $ar, world qisis od potential world revoturion. The
err of anti-fascism postponed reRection. Modernism sdll belong€d to
avanFgarde dd opposition, dcept among rh€ induslrial designers rnd
advertising agencies.It had not won.
Except in thc socirlist r€girnes it shared rhe victo.y over Hirler. Mod-
ernism in art and archit€cture conquered tfie US.A_, filling th€ sllleries
and prestige corporation omc€s wirh "abstract expressionists," and the
busiress districts of Americ$ cni€s with rhe synbols of rhe .,inremr-
tional style"Jongated r€dangullr box€s stmding on endt not so much
soapiry the sky as flmeninS rheir roofs againsr ir with gr€tt el€grncq as
in Mies van der Rohe's Sergram buildin& or just very hish, liire
the World Trad€ C€nter (both in New York). On the otd Continenr, to
som€ stent follo$ing the Am€rican nend, which now inclined to .s-
sociat€mod€rnism with'rwestern values," absraction (,.non-figurative
arC') in the visual lrts and modernism in architecture became Dart.

sometimes the domindt pdt, of the €sbblished cultural scene, eve! re-
viving in countries like Britdn, where it h.d seemedto stagnate.
Yet from the end of the 1960sr marked rerction asrinst it became in-
cre.sinsly manif€st and, in the 1980s, fashionable under such l.bels 6
"postmodernism." It was not so much a 'lmovem€nt" as a denial of any
pre-stablished cdt€ria of judgment ar slue in tle arts, or ind€ed of
the possibiliry of such judgments. In dchit€ctue, where this reaction
first and most visibly made itself felt, it surrDounted skyscrapers with
Chippendale pediments, all the nore provocative for having been built by
the very co inventor of the term "intemnional style," Philip Johnson
(1906- ). Critics for whom th€ spontaneously sheed Manhattu skyline
had once been the model of the modern city-scape, discovered the virtues
of the tot.lly unstructured Los Angeles, a d6ert of d€tail without shrye,
the paradise (or hell) of those who "did their own thing." lrrational
thoush they rv€re, aesthetic-mord rules had govemed modem dchite€
turc, but henceforth anything went.
The a€hierement of the modern movement in architecture had b€en
impressi\-e. Ir hrd, since 1945,buik the airpods tha! bound the world to-
sether, its fldories, its omce buildings and such public buildinss .s still
needcd to be erected--capitrl citie! in the Third World, rnuseuns, un;
versities and theatres in the First. lt had presided over the massive and
global rebuildins of cities in the 1960s,for even in the socialist$orld its
technical iMovations, which lent thenselvesto cheap rnd rapid con-
struction of mas housing, left their mark. tt had, without serious doubt,
produced . substmtid rumber of v€ry b€autiful buildings or even mas
rerpieces, rhoush also a nunber of usly on€s and y€ry mmy more frce
less and i umm ut boxes. The lchierem€nts of p6t w.r modernist
painting and s€ulpture $ere incompar*ly less and usually much inferior
to their inter-war predecessofs, |s a compadson of Prrisian dt in the
1950s with that of the 1920s immediately demonstrates. It consisted
larsely of a series of increasinsly desperate gimmicks by which rrtists
sought to give th€ir rvork m imediateiy r€cognizable individual trrde
mark, a sucesion of manifestos of despir orubdicarion in th€ fac€ of
the noods of non-art wh;ch submerBedthe old-style artist (pop arl,
Dubuffefs dr, ,ru, .nd the like), the assimilatiotr of doodles and other
bits rnd pieces, or of gesturcs reducing the sort of art which was prim -
ily bousht for investment and its collectots ad akbduft, as by adding an
individual'snameto piles of brick or soil ("minimal arr") or by prevenF
ing it frcm becoming such I connodity through making it tm short
liv€d to be perrnment ("performance arC').
The snell of impendins death rose from these avant-gardes. The
Th. hant-sade Diet-Ihe *ts Aftet 195A 5n
future wns no longEr rheirs, though nobody knew whose ir wrs. More
than ev€r, they lnew rhdselves to b€ on the mdgin. Compared to the
real revolution in p€rception and rep.esentation achieved via rechnology
by the money m*ers, the formal innovarions of studio bohemians had
always been child's play. Whn werc the Futurists' imitations of sp€ed
on canva! compar€d to r€al sped, or evel to mounting a filn cmd. or
a locomotive footplrt€, which anyone could do! What were concert €x-
perim€nts with electronic sound in modernist compositions, which every
impresario knew to be box omc€ poison, conpar€d ro rock mudc which
made electronic sound into th€ music of the millions? If dl "hish
arts" wer€ segregated in ghettos, could th€ awt€ddes fail to obserae
that their own sections of the gh€tto were tinJ rnd dirninishins as my
comparison of the sales of Chopin and Schiinb€rs confirrned? With rhe
rise of pop dt, even the major ranpart of rnodemism in rhe visual arts,
abstraction, lost its heg€mony. Representation orce a$in b€came le-
"Postmodemisn" therefore atrrck€d borh self-confidenr and exfiaust€d
styles! or rath€r the w.ys of conducting both activiries which had to gt) on,
in one style orunother, like buildins dd public wo.ks, and rhose which
were not in th€mselv€s indispensable, like rh€ artism prod ction of ers€l
printinss to b€ sold singly. Hence it would b€ misleading ro rndys€ ir pi
mrily as a trend within the arq like the developm€nt of the earli€r avanr-
gsrd€s. Actu.lll we lnow thrt rhe term "postmodcrnism" sp.ead ro all
manrc. of fi€lds that had nothing to do with the arrs. By the 190s there
were "postmod€rn" philosoph€n, social scienrists,anthropologists, histori-
us nd oth€r practitioners of disciplines that had not pr€viously tended ro
borrow their terminology from the arts avanFgard€, €vcn wher tney hap-
pened to be ass@iatedwith then. Literary criticism, of course, adopted it
with enthusiasrn. In fact "postnodem" fashions, pioneered under l"rious
names ("d€eonstruction," "posFstructuralism," etc) among the French
spoking intellig€ntsia,mde their way into (U.S.)departm€nrsofliterature
and thence into the rest of the humrnities dd social sciences.
All "postinodernisms" had in conlnon u ess€ntial sc€pricism about
the existdce of an obiective r€ality, andlor rhe possibility of arriving ar
an .greed und€rstudirg of ir by rational means.All tended ro a radicd
rel ivisn. AIl, ther€fore, challensed the essenceofa world that r€sred on
th€ opposit€ assmptions, nam€ly the rorld transformed by science ind
th€ technology based upon it, and rhe id€olosy of progress which re-
flected it. We shrll consider the d€v€lopment of this strangg )€t not un
e{pe€ted contradiction in the nexr chaprer Within the more resrricred
fi€ld of th€ high arts, the contrdiction w|s not so extreme sinc€, as we
518 Th. Lankkh
ba\e seen(Age of E npire, chapter 9), the rnodernist amt-grdes had al
reidy extended tic limits of whrt could clain to be "art" (ot llt any rate,
yield products thrt could be sold or lesed or otherwise profitably sepa
rated ftom their cr€ators as "arC') almost to infinitl Whrt "postmod-
ernisrn" ptoduced was rder a (ldsely senerrtional) sry between those
who were repelled by whlt they saw as rhe nihilisr frivolity of the new
mode and those who thousht t'&ing the arts "seriously" was inst one
more relic of the obsolere past. Whar, rhey argled, was wrong wirh '1h€
retuse dumps of civilizatior . . . camouflrged with plasdc" {hich s out
rag€d the social philosopher Jnrgen Habern$, last outpost of the fnnous
Frankfurt Schmll (Hushes, 1988,p. 146).
"Postmod€rnism" w6 therefore not onfined to the ms. Nevertheless.
there wer€ probably good reasonswhy the term should have lirst emerged
from the ut scene. For the very essenceof the av4nFgrrde arts Ms the
s€archfor ways of expressingwhat could not possiblybe expressedin
t€rms of th€ past, umely the reafity of the twentieth century. This was
one of the two branches of that century's great dream, the other being
th€ serch for th€ radicl trunsformatioD of that realitJr Both were rcvo
lutionny in different sensesof the word, but both wer€ about th€ same
woild. Boih coincided to some extent in rhe 1880slnd 1890s, and asain
b€tw€en 1914 and the defert of fascism, when cre ive talents were so
often revolutionarv. or rt least radical, in both senseFusu.ily but by no
m€ms always on the Left. Both were to f.il, although in fsct both havc
modined the world of 2000 so profoundly that their marks cannot con-
In retrospet it is clear that the proj€ct of avanFgard€ revolution was
doomed to failure from the outset, both by virtue of its intellectual arbi
trariness and by the nature of th€ mode of production the creative arts
representedin a liberal bourgeoissociety.Almost any of the numerous
manifestos by means of which avanFgrrde a(ists have announced thcir
intentions in th€ course of th€ past hundr€d y€ars demonstrate the lack
of mherence betweenends and means,the object and the methods of
achieving it. A particular version of nov€tty is not the necessaryconse
quenceof choosing !o rej€ct the old. Music which deliberatelyavoids
tonality is not necessarilySchbnberg's serial music, basd on th€ permut!-
tions of the tw€lvenotesof the chromaticscaleinor is this the ody basis
for *rial nusiq nor is serial nusic necessarilyatonal. Cubism, howevs at-
tractiv€, had no theoretical rationale whatever.Ind€ed, the very decision Io
abandon trnditional procedures and rules for rew ores may be as arbitrary
c the choice of puticular novelties. The equivalert of 'lnodernisrn"
in chess,the so-caued"hyper-rnodern" school of playersof the 1920!
The Arant sa e Diet-'rhe Ar^ Atrlt 1950 5t9
(R€ti, Griinfeld, Nimzowitsch, et al.) did not propose to chmge the rutes
of the game, $ sone did. They nerely reacted asainsr .onlenrion (the
"classical" sch@l of 'lrrasch) by €xploitins paradox---<hoosing uncon-
ventiond openings ("Aft€r l, P-K4 White's g.rne is in the lst throes")
and observing rather thrn occupying rhe cenrre. Most writ€rs, and cer-
tainly most poets, in practic€ did the sam€_They went ofl accepting rhe
traditioml procedures, e.g. rhymed and netr€d rerse whcre it s€emedap-
propriatg and broke with @nvention in other ways. Katka was not less
"rnodern" than Joyce becausehis prose was less adventurous. Moreover,
wheremodemist style claimedto havean intellectualrationale,e.s. as ex-
pressins the era of the mchine or of (later) the ll)mputerl the connection
was purely netaphorical. In any ase, rhe an€mpt to assimilate ,.rhe work
of art in the era of its technical reproducibiliry" (Beniamin, t96l) to rhe
old nodel of the individual cretive nrtist recosnizing only his persoml
inspiration was bound to fail. Cr€ation was now essentially cooperariv€
rather than individual, technological rather than manual. Th€ youna
French film oitics whq in the 1950s, d€veloped I rh€ory of film as the
work ofa sinsle.reativea!r?,/, the director on rhe basis,ofalt rhirss, of
a passion for the Hollywood B-movies of the 1930s ard 1940s. were rb-
surd becausecoordinatedcooperarionand division of labour was and is
the ess€nceof those whose business is to fill the eveninss on public and
priEte scre€ns,or to produc€ sone oder regular successionof v.orls fo.
m€ntal consumption, such .s newspapers oi magazinG. The talents that
w€nt into the chrrcteristic forms of twentieti-{entury creation, which
were m.inly products fot or by-products of the mlss market. were not
infedor to those of the classic ninetenth-century bourgeois modet, but
they could no lonscr afford rhe clAsical artisfs role of th€ loner. Their
odly direct link with th€ir clssic predec€ssorsw.s through that timited
sator of the classic "high arrs, which had always operated throush ol
lectivesr the stage. If Akir. Kurosawa (1910- ), Luchino Visconri
(1906-76)or S€rs€iEisersrein(1898-1948)-to nm€ onty thfee unqu6
tionably very great arrists of th€ century, alt wirh a theltriml back-
ground-had wished to creare i! the manner of Ftaubert. Courb€t or
even Dickens, none of them would have sor very far
Yet, as Walt€r Benjamin obseryed,the era of,,technicat reproducibility"
translbrmed not only rhc way in which cration rook ptac€ rhus making
the filrn, rnd dl drat derived frorn it (t€l€vision, deo) into th€ certml art
of th€ c€ntury-but also the way ir which human beinss perceived rert
ity and experienced creative works. This vl"s no longer by means of thos€
acs of secular worship and prayer for which the nuseumq saueries, con
c€rt h: ls and public theatr€s, th w€re so rypicl of nin€t€enrh{e ury
52O Th, Lar^l'de
bourg€oiscivilizrtion, provided the church€s.Tourism, $hich nos 6lled
these establishments with foreigners rather than natives, and €ducation
were the last strongholdsof this sort of arFconsumption.The numbers
uDd€rgoingthese experienceswere, of course, enornously larger than
ever before, but cv€n most of these whq aftef etbowing themselves t{)
within sight of rhe Paid,r/d in thc Flor€nceUmzi, stood in sil€nt awe.
or who were moved as they r@d Shakespear€as part of the ex.minatiDn
syllabus,usually lived in a diferent nultifarious and motley universeoi'
per.eptiotr. Sense impressions, even ideas, were apt to feach them simul
taneously from .ll sides-throrsh the combination of hedlines and pi.
tur€s, text and advertisement on the newsp.per pag€, th€ sound in th(
€arphoneas rhe eyescannedthc pas€,through the iuxtapositionofirnas(,
voice, print and sound-all, rs like as not, taken in peripheratlx unless,
for I moment, somethingconcentrateditiention. This had long b€enrhc
w.y in which city p@ple experienced the sreet, in snich popular fan
ground and circus ent€rtainmentoperated,faniliar to artists and critics
sinc€ the days of the Rornantics. The noyelty w6 thrt t€chnology br(l
drenched everyday lif€ in prilat€ as *ell as in public with art. Never had
it been harder to avoid aesthetic experiene- The "work of an" was lost
in tbe no\,,of words,of sounds,of inagcs, in the universtl environnenr
of what would once have been elled art.
Could it still be so cailed? For those who cared for such thinss, srerl
and lasting works could still be ideDtifred,thoush in the developedparts
of the worid the works exclusivelycreatedby a sinsle individud an(l
idendfiableonly with hiln or her becameincreasinslyn.rsi.al. And so,
with the elception ofbuiidings, did singleworks of cr€dion or onstrue
tion that werenot desisEedfor r€production.Could it still be iudged an(l
sraded by th€ stmdards which had governed the assssm€nt of thesc
matters in the great days of bourgeois civilizrtiont Yes and no. Measur;ng
merit by chronologyhad never suited the arts: cr€atile works had oevlt
been better merely becausethey w€re old, as was thought in th€ R€nais
sancq or becausethey were mor€ rreent thm others, 3s the avant-8Erd.$
held. The latt€r criterion becarn€absurd in the later twentieth century,
when it merged with the economic inter€stsof consuner industri$,
which made their profits out of r short fashion-c]'cle, and instant mrsr
salesof micles for intensivebut brief use.
On rhe other hand it w6 still both possibleand necessary to apply rh.
distinction b€twe€n what \{rs serious and what was trtuial, betwe€n goorl
and bad, professional and rmateur in the rtu, and all th€ more necess.rtr
be€ausea nurnberof interestedparti€s d€nied such distinctionE on rh.
grounds that the only measur€ of merit was rh€ sales figDre, or that th$
The Aaatt sdhle Die\ The At^ lli.t 1950 521
wcr€ elitist, or thar, as postmodernismargued,no objectile distinctions
could be made at all- Indecd, only the ideologistsand salesmenheld such
absufd views in public, and in their private capacityeven most of these
kncw that they distinguish€db€tweengood and bad. In l99l r hishly
successfulBritish mass m$ket j€weller created a scandal by telling r con-
ference of businessmenth.t his profits camc from selling crap to peoplc
who had no taste for inything better He, unlike postmodem th€orists,
knew that judsmentsof quality w€re part of life.
But if such judgments were still possible, were they still lelevant to the
world in which, for most urban citizens,th€ spheresof life and art, of
emotion scnerrtcd fron within and enotion generated frotn without, or
wort md leisure, were ingeasingly indistinsuish.blc? Or rathcr, were
they still .elev.nt outside the specialized enclosurcs of school and acde-
mia in which so nuch of the traditionrl arts were seekiry refuse? It is
dimcult to say,becausethe very attempt to rrswer or to formul.t€ such a
question rnay beg it. It is quite easy to write the history of iazz or to dis
cuss ils rchi€vemcnts in terns quit€ similar to those applicable to class;
cal rnusic, allowing for the considerable difTerenc€ in the social milieu,
and the public and the economics of this forrn of art. k is by no ne3ns
clear that such a procedure makes any sensefor rock nusic, cven though
this is also derived from American bl.c! music. What thc achievementsof
huis Armstrong or Charlie Parker lre, and tbeir superioritj over other
contempordries h or can be mad€ clear On the other hl1nd it seems far
more dimcult for sonone who h6 not fus€da particularsound with his
or her lifg to p;cl out this or that .ock group from the hugc flood of
sound which has srept down the relley of this music for the past fort'
yeds. Billie lloliday has (at least,until the time of writins) been.ble to
communic e with listencrs who were born mmy years .fter she died.
Can .nyone who wa not a contemporarf of th€ Rolling Stones develop
snything lik€ rh€ passionateenthusiasn which this group arouscd in the
middl€ 196ft? How much of the p$sion for sone sound or irnage today
h basedon csociation: not becausethe song is admirrble but because
'this is our sons"?We .annot tell. The rcl€, or cven thc sul\ivaL of liv
ing arts in th€ twenty 6rst century are obscureuntil {c can.
This is not the casesith the roles of the sciences.