My Dinner with Merce and its Connection to Cultural Policy

Cunningham's is and has been for many years now to a very wide audience, relative to the dance field. Cage's star continues to rise and his influence on music continues to grow as well.

I doubt that Mark Morris has greater appeal than Merce, however you slice "appeal."

I think that Mark would laugh pretty hard being presented as a mainstram counterbalance to Merce Cunningham. Apparently, Ms. Kahmi, you've never heard Mark speak and most likely know little about his work. For if you did, you might be using Paula Abdul rather than Mark Morris as your example of experiments and the deplorable state of public financing thereof.

That's too sadly pissy a comment (Ms. Kamhi's) to leave as a comment to a truly great artist. On the contrary, I was strongly impressed by the number of just plain folks who left tributes to Merce at his Salon obituary. I don't know nuthin' about dance, my wife isn't an artist of any kind, but every time we saw Merce's company dance we were blown away by the number of things you could *do* with dance that we never could have imagined, the number of dance issues we never realized we could understand. His work far transcended its experimental origins and became something for everyman.

It's a damn shame that this country won't give great artists anywhere near the funding they need to do their work. Equally sad is the number of beginning artists who will never develop fully because they are not allowed the time and materials. Someday this country's historians will look back on a stunted artistic world that was never allowed to blossom. Instead, we had reality TV (which I suppose fits Ms. Kamhi's criterion for appealing to a wider public).

If avant-gardists such as Merce Cunningham and John Cage were indeed national "artistic treasures," they should have been able to attract generous private support. The problem is that their work (unlike that of choreographer Mark Morris, for example) has never been able to appeal to a wider audience than artworld insiders.

Forcing the public to foot the bill for their “experiments” is a deplorable idea. By their own admission, such experiments amounted to anti-art (that is why the public has rejected it). For evidence, see the analysis of their work and what they said about it in What Art Is (pages 220-29)--which I co-authored. The relevant pages can be viewed at Google Books: http://tinyurl.com/nnvhpm.

Michelle Marder Kamhi, Co-Editor, Aristos (An Online Review of the Arts)