Taste: The Novice in the Sweetshop

The book business is booming, classical recordings are selling by the stack, and art galleries are thriving. But Columbia University’s Dean of Faculties Jacques Barzun gloomily contends that, in fact, the age is witnessing an end to Art. Says Barzun, writing in the British monthly Encounter: “The Romantic worship of art, having lost its purpose, heads towards self-extinction. The nations of the West now resemble those tribes that eat their gods to get the good there is in them.”

Abolition & Revolution. Barzun (TIME cover, June 11, 1956) ascribes this self-extinction to two influences that conflict with each other at the same time that they drive toward “the same Carthaginian end.” The first is the group he labels the “Abolitionists,” those creators of romantic art in literature, painting and music whose dream is to erase the great art of the past and to fill the void with a new consciousness: “So far, the sounds of electronic music are meaningless, like the drippings and droppings of the abstract expressionist and action painters, like the words and images that the beat poets seek to capture with a tape recorder during their mindless monologues or in the trances of drug-taking…They want to carry nothing forward, but to get rid of all their inherited aesthetic and intellectual lumber; they have no public hope, for they feel soiled and guilty from contact with any part of existing society. They want to strip bare and dig down to a hoped-for bedrock showing no trace of an earlier passage of man. This is what Mr. Allen Ginsberg means when he says that man himself is obsolete; this is what Samuel Beckett and others are trying to show us on a stage where no responses are predictable or congenial; this is what Mr. Henry Miller is explaining at length in works where visions of love and feasts of sexuality outrank and displace all other concerns…The only acceptable art is the art of Unconsciousness, of Accident, of No-Meaning.”

The second destructive influence, says Barzun, is the culture boom itself. “Feeling the old attachment to high Art,” Barzun sees in the “very abundance and availability of the democratized arts the causes of a prompt dissolution…The powerful devices of mechanical reproduction and high pressure distribution to which we owe the cultural ‘awakening’ necessarily distort and thus destroy. All the new media make arbitrary demands on the materials fed through them. And because the public to be served is large and failure costly, it is important that the product suit—hence the endless cutting and adapting, reworking and diluting, which end in travesty. The films of Hamlet, Wuthering Heights or David Copperfield are obvious examples of one kind of demolition…To see the works of the Impressionists twisted into backgrounds for advertising perfume; to hear the melodies of Bach, Mozart, Berlioz and Chopin re-handled by Tin Pan Alley; to listen to absent-minded hacks giving the lowdown on high art…all this is destructive in the same measure that it is communicative.”

Cornucopious. The very bulk of the output kills appetite, Barzun writes. “Symphonies in bars and cabs, classical drama on television any day of the week, highbrow paperbacks in mountainous profusion (easier to buy than to read), ‘art seminars in the home,’ capsule operas, ‘Chopin by Starlight.’ ‘The Sound of Wagner,’ ‘The Best of World Literature’; this cornucopia thrust at the inexperienced and pouring out its contents over us all deadens attention and keeps taste stillborn, like any form of gross feeding. Too much art in too many places means art robbed of its right associations, its exact forms, its concentrated power. We are grateful for the comprehensive repertoire which modern industry for the first time puts within our reach, but we turn sick at the aggressive temptation, like the novice in the sweetshop. Even the otherwise commendable Do-it-yourself movement, represented by the Sunday painter and the Friday evening singer or player, contributes to the dissipation of the artistic tradition; high art was not made for these uses.”*

Despite his criticisms, Author Barzun insists that he is not condemning the age, only discerning its fate: “There is nothing to reprove and nothing to bewail.” What he calls the total repudiation of Art, he concludes, must mean that “we may suppose the birth of a new consciousness neither far off nor unwelcome. Whatever the time, we have every reason now for believing our artists when they tell us that Art is dead.”

* Author Barzun’s own wares in the sweetshop include paperback editions of five of his books. He is also a director (along with Fellow Intellectuals Lionel Trilling and W. H. Auden) of the Mid-Century Book Society, a kind of egghead’s book-of-the-month club.