WS]>I have nothing against "market art" as long as it does not crowd out
>other forms.
DC] That's what I used to think about the Beatles. But now I think that in the long run you can't kill good art, no matter how hard you try. Maybe a bigger problem is what Nick Lowe said recently about music. There's so much pretty good stuff out there that "Pretty good is the new terrible."
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This last point is only half-way to the truth. The truth is that there is way too much really great stuff, far more than any given collection of humans can sort out and become acquainted with. There was a time when, on the whole, all educated persons shared the same texts; now there are simply too many immortal masterpieces, and take any two readers (take those who read the most), and they won't share all the same authors. Probably this flood of work, beginning in the early 17th-c, contributed to the appearance of "taste" (or "gusto") in discussions of art. I've always suspected that the Temptation of Athens in Paradise Regained is an index to Milton's sense that a flood had started and that some winnowing of first-rate stuff (e.g. Sophocles, Plato, etc) would be necessary to make room for new production. To feel one's superior taste for the last couple centuries it has been increasingly necessary to sort out some of the first rate and sneer at it as inferior. After all, what marks an intellectual is not what he/she likes but what he/she can sneer at.
Carrol