3.2. Read the following text. The Return of Beauty

What a difference a century makes. In 1903, comparatively few Americans took anything like a passionate interest in the arts. Only two living American novelists, Mark Twain and Henry James, had done major work, and Twain’s was long behind him. Our best painters, the American impressionists, hewed to a style frankly derivative of their European models; our art museums were narrowly provincial in scope and ambition. We had no great composers, no great poets or playwrights, no ballet companies, and only a handful of symphony orchestras and opera companies.

Merely to draw up such a list, though, is to see how radically the arts in America were transformed in the 20th century. Under the aspect of modernity, the United States came to play a central role in all the arts. (We even invented three new art forms — jazz, modem dance, and the motion picture.) In addition to producing world-class artists of our own, this country attracted émigrés from all over the world whose work was promptly absorbed into the mainstream of American culture. Moreover, the mass media made the fruits of this great transformation available not merely to a highly educated elite class but to any American who cared to partake of what the British poet Matthew Arnold so famously called "the best that has been thought and said in the world."

To be sure, ours is essentially a popular culture, and one cannot fully appreciate any kind of American art without acknowledging the extent to which so much of the best of it springs from that culture. The art critic Clement Greenberg, among the first commentators to single out "middlebrow" popular culture as a threat to the integrity of high art in America, once referred to "the American mind" as typified by "its positivism, its unwillingness to speculate, its eagerness for quick results, and its optimism." But he failed to realize that those traits might themselves serve as the basis for a characteristically American style in art, one that would amalgamate high, middle, and low, thereby ennobling popular culture even as it popularized serious culture. It was a tricky balancing act, and many artists found it hard to keep from slipping into the slough of pandering.

But it was possible, and today no one needs to be persuaded of the significance of those modernists who spoke in the crisply empirical, immediately accessible tone of voice now acknowledged by the whole world as ail-American. Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Willa Cather, Aaron Copland, Stuart Davis, Duke Ellington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, John Ford, George Gershwin, Howard Hawks, Edward Hopper, Flannery O'Connor. Jerome Robbins, Frank Lloyd Wright: Surely these and others like them rank high among our exemplary figures, the ones whose work is indelibly stamped "Made in U.S.A."

And what of the state of American art now that the modem era has come at last to an end? For the most part, it is quite astonishingly vital and promising, though some art forms, not surprisingly, are in better shape than others. But it is also true that art in America is coming out of a bad patch. Starting in the 1960s, American culture, for the first time in its brief history, fell victim to a bad idea, one that for close to a quarter-century held considerable sway over our artists and critics. All at once, it seemed, we had lost our collective willingness to make value judgments — to take Duke Ellington seriously while simultaneously acknowledging that Aaron Copland was the greater composer. In its place, we got postmodernism, which not only denied that either man was great, but rejected the very idea of greatness itself.

The destruction of the World Trade Center, among countless other things, may well have brought an end to the unthinking acceptance of postmodern relativism. What Americans wanted in their time of need was beauty, and they never doubted for a moment that such a thing existed.

But this collective renewal of belief in the power of truth and beauty did not suddenly take place on the morning of September 11, 2001. It was already in the wind, just as postmodernism itself was not so much an era as an episode, a gradual transition from one cultural epoch to the next. What we are now seeing, by contrast, is the emergence of a genuinely new style for which no one as yet has coined a better name than “post-postmodernism.”

All this suggests that when it comes to post-postmodern art in America, it doesn’t much matter where you do it or what you call it, so long as the results are beautiful. And it is no coincidence that post-postmodern artists are increasingly willing to use that word without encasing it in the protective quotation marks of irony.

But if September 11 taught us anything, it was that beauty is real, as real as evil, and worth fighting for. That is what Liebermann, Moravec, Mark Morris, Kenneth Lonergan, and the rest of America’s post-postmodernists are doing. They are fighting for the right to make beautiful art – and winning.

Terry Teachout, the music critic of Commentary and the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, writes “Second City”, a column for the Washington Post about the arts in New York City”. His writings about books, dance, film, music, and the visual arts also appear regularly in National Review, the New York Times, and many other American magazines and newspapers. His most recent book sis The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken.

Source: U.S. Society & Values / April, 2003

Size: 5,427 characters with spaces