|
Tocqueville . . . "I do not believe that it is a necessary effect of democratic institutions to diminish the number of those who cultivate the fine arts," he wrote in a famous passage from Democracy in America, "but these causes exert a powerful influence on the manner in which these arts are cultivated. In aristocracies, a few great pictures are produced, in democratic countries, a vast number of insignificant ones."
. . .
Moral correctness, political correctness, and aesthetic correctness all derive from the same censorial Puritan spirit. Like a replay of parent and child, the corrector demands the right to punish the artist’s incorrigible impulse to misbehave.
. . .
There is a fourth horseman laying siege to the arts these days, perhaps the most ominous of all, and its name is fiscal correctness.
. . .
price being exacted by America’s well-intentioned commitment to diversity, namely, the prospect of a pluralistic culture without high art, a generous and democratic society in which everything is given equal opportunity, except the greatest achievements of the Western world.
2:14:30 PM Google It!
|
|