>I can't agree with Brian that de gustibus non
>disputandam est (eek, I really am an awful snob), that
>thre's nothing to be said between the Monkees and
>Beethoven; even though I like low art and high class
>trash as much as the next guy, I think it's important
>that people be able recognize the good stuff and know
>what it is good.
>
People can recognize the good stuff if they are exposed to it. People
say that they know what they like; but it's truer to say that they like
what they know. I would say 99% of the problem is lack of exposure. Our
modern mass-market world is touted to be a rich one, but from the point
of view of anything that serves as a foundation for art, it is far more
impovrished than the natural world.
What people know is largely defined by the market, which is largely defined by CEO's trying to guess what the next trend is going to be and often also deciding how trends develop: rap into gangsta rap, etc. How people know also matters. You know art one way when you consume it and another when you are capable of creating it. You know art one way when you enjoy it alone and another when you share it with a group of people. We are largely consumers of art; art education has been eliminated from the public schools, and the social setting of art is now limited to the concert stage or the earphones. So, I see a great narrowing and a great polarization of people's experience of art to the detriment both of low and high art.
I have already described the devolution of folk art into commodified mass market art: gospel/jazz/blues into rock for example. One consequence of that is that when artists working on a grand scale turn to what is now folk art (mass marketed commerical art) for insipiration, they do not find very fertile soil. Matisse anchored a high-art corpus on Romanian peasant blouses and french textiles; african sculpture influenced Giacometti and Brancusi and others; Oriental rugs gave Gaugin his palette; the folk music of eastern europe gave Bartok a new harmonic vocabulary....but what can a "classical" artist get out of rock and roll?
Joanna