A reader writes:
Have we run out of art? And do we really need any more of it? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (and I’m sure you ask yourself that question on a daily basis). Have we painted all the paintings we need, recorded all the great music, taken all the great photographs, written all the great operas and ballets, etc.?
In other words, is the demand for new art diminishing–not because we are a soulless culture obsessed with celebrity and real estate–but because there’s more than enough great stuff out there to consume, and we don’t have nearly enough time to enjoy it? There seems to be such a glut of everything artistic these days. In jazz alone, I could go on listening to new and already-heard stuff from the same 1940s and 1950s period until I dropped dead at 100 without running out, and that’s jazz alone. Meaning, I really don’t need any more jazz to be produced. It’s all on disc. I don’t need any more cabaret singers singing Cole Porter, or young guys in suits playing Fats Navarro, etc.
Can one argue that we already have all the great works we need and that if the number of artists producing works is declining, the reason has more to do with the fact that artists have nothing more to say that hasn’t been said already v. you can’t make a living doing it?
Artists, don’t fly off the handle. My correspondent (who is also a good friend) is raising a serious question, asked by a person who genuinely loves art but finds himself grappling with the vexing problem of how to allocate that most precious of all unrenewable resources: time.
Remember that no one, not even the wealthiest of connoisseurs, has an unlimited amount of time to spend on art. However wisely or unwisely we allocate them, there are only twenty-four hours in a day. Sooner or later, we have to choose. In order to write my weekly Wall Street Journal column, I see every play that comes to Broadway, and I also do my best to catch what I expect to be the most important off-Broadway and out-of-town openings. Yet even if I did nothing but go to plays, I still wouldn’t be able to see all the shows that interested me. Factor in the additional time I spend looking at ballets, operas, and art exhibitions, listening to concerts, going to nightclubs, reading books…but you get the point, right? I make hard cultural choices every day, and the hardest of these is deciding how much of my inescapably limited free time to devote to seeking out new works of art.
When it comes to theater, of course, the choice is to some extent made for me. In a sense, every theatrical production is “new,” even a revival of Hamlet. And while I suppose you could spend your whole playgoing life doing nothing but attending performances of the classics, that’d still leave you with plenty of nights off. Not so the other art forms, especially those that are physically embodied (like painting) or can be reproduced mechanically (like music). With them, you can spend your days living exclusively in the past, and it goes without saying, or should, that such an existence can be wholly fulfilling. If I had to spend the rest of my life with Rembrandt, Schubert, and Flannery O’Connor, who’s to say it would somehow be less satisfactory than a life spent with Cy Twombly, Philip Glass, and Jane Smiley? Not me.
None of this, however, means that there is no case to be made for the new. On the contrary, one of the most important parts of my work as a critic is to make that case, to seek out exciting new works of art and write about them so evocatively that my readers feel moved to go out and experience them at first hand. I’m not talking about eat-your-spinach modern art, either. I don’t like that any more than most people do. Late modernism in all its painfully earnest guises was a concerted assault on the sensibilities, one that persuaded a generation of unhappy audiences to shun the new–but those days, as the kids say, are soooo over. In the past year, I’ve written about such accessible, immediately involving new works of art as Jane Freilicher’s My Cubism, Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza, Agn