{"id":1948,"date":"2020-12-22T12:22:03","date_gmt":"2020-12-22T17:22:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1948"},"modified":"2020-12-22T12:22:07","modified_gmt":"2020-12-22T17:22:07","slug":"the-erasure-of-the-arts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2020\/12\/the-erasure-of-the-arts.html","title":{"rendered":"The Erasure of the Arts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Upswing\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This week\u2019s\u00a0The American Purpose<\/em> carries another of my essays<\/a><\/strong> on the erasure of the arts from the American experience \u2013 how it happened and what to do about it. It\u2019s a sequel to my piece <\/a><\/strong>in the current\u00a0American Scholar<\/em> on the impact of the pandemic on culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My new piece takes the form of a response to The Upswing<\/em>, the important new book co-authored by the sociologist Robert Putnam (who also wrote Bowling Alone<\/em>) on the disappearance of \u201csocial capital.\u201d It\u2019s another way at looking at today\u2019s fragmentation of American life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I write: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To me the most salient feature of The Upswing<\/em>, the most surprising and disappointing, is incidental. In their consideration of how Americans bond or don\u2019t, [the authors] fail to consider novels and poems, concerts and plays, paintings and sculpture. Beethoven preached universal brotherhood with overwhelming eloquence. Cold War cultural diplomacy discovered the healing commonality of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. But there are no symphonies or concertos in The Upswing<\/em>. . . . <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, I have the uncomfortable feeling that The Upswing<\/em>may partly be a symptom of the shortcomings it observes. And it is not alone. Another recent study of the American experience of wide importance is Jill Lepore\u2019s These Truths: A History of the United States<\/em><\/strong>. It\u2019s a marvelous read, entertaining, informative, provocative, elegantly turned \u2013 and yet wholly omits the arts. Could an 800-page, one-volume history of Germany do without Goethe or Beethoven? Could the history of Italy be told without Michelangelo and Verdi? Britain without Shakespeare? Spain without Cervantes? And yet Lepore\u2019s emphasis on the Black experience, so welcome and overdue, omits any reference to Black music; jazz and the Harlem Renaissance, Ellington and Armstrong, Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson are all silent. Absent, as well, are Whitman and Longfellow, Moby Dick<\/em>and The Sound and the Fury<\/em>, Huck Finn and Rhapsody in Blue<\/em>, Hollywood and Broadway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is this perhaps a phenomenon of the left, rejecting \u201cpatriarchal\u201d high culture? Apparently not. Ben Sasse\u2019s Them: Why We Hate Each Other \u2013 and How to Heal<\/em><\/strong>, by a Republican senator with an impressive intellectual bent, plausibly opines: \u201cThe problem is that our ever more ferocious political tribalism and mutual hatred don\u2019t originate in politics, so politics isn\u2019t going to heal them.\u201d Adducing the same torn fabric as Putnam and Garrett, he blames the digital age. He laments the diminishing pertinence of friends, church, and community. But I happen to be a stranger to Senator Sasse\u2019s world of church and picnics. I worry that religion may be as much a divisive as a binding factor in America\u2019s map of red versus blue. When I think about fostering a lost \u201csense of place,\u201d I think about shared American identity via shared history and culture (as did Willa Cather, whose formative frontier experiences in Senator Sasse\u2019s Nebraska included the Lieder and operas of German immigrants). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now there is the pandemic to drive it all home. In European nations, \u201csave our cultural institutions\u201d is widely regarded as a necessary cause. In the US, the same cry is not heard. What is going on? Were the arts always a negligible component of the New World experience, insufficiently cultivated? Or did they become negligible? Are we as a nation simply too young to dig deep expressive roots? Too diverse? Too much crippled by our original sins of slavery and the Indian Wars? Is any of that pertinent to bowling alone?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week\u2019s\u00a0The American Purpose carries another of my essays on the erasure of the arts from the American experience \u2013 how it happened and what to do about it. It\u2019s a sequel to my piece in the current\u00a0American Scholar on the impact of the pandemic on culture. My new piece takes the form of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1948","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-vq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1948"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1952,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1948\/revisions\/1952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}