Adieu to the Avant-Garde

As the artistic regime shifts, realism, rhyme, and representation make a comback.

Kanchan Limaye from the July 1997 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

Kuspit, for his part, wondered "if poetry simply hasn't become another specialized activity, like all other activities in our society?" adding that "maybe only specialists understand specialists in some sense." Gioia's deadpan response was that that had been his point. Subsidized culture, freed of audience interaction, becomes insular.

Anyway, composer de Kenessey argued, the growth of cultural subsidies did not reflect social complexity or specialization; it was, rather, medieval in its exercise of the power of taste. "In the Middle Ages," she said, "the composer had only to please the bishop who was commissioning the work...and the situation, ironically, is quite medieval at the end of the 20th century, precisely because classical music operates much in the same realm. In fact, the decision over whether to recommission a composer will not be dependent on audience response, because [the music] is unlikely to make it into the marketplace....The so-called high arts are very much tailored to, and governed by, the small professional elite."

None of the Guardists was suggesting that subsidized work was necessarily bad, or even that subsidies are inherently wrong. Nor were they saying that whatever a mass audience approves is good. They argued only that those cultures that become dependent on elite aesthetic judgment lose a vital relationship with their audience, and threaten to become moribund. This would seem to be a controversial view only within the cultural establishment itself, which regards it as bizarre. But then that establishment doesn't know where its money has been, and doesn't want to put it where its mouth is. Because it talks.