Word: barzun
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Abolition & Revolution. Barzun (TIME cover, June 11, 1956) ascribes this self-extinction to two influences that conflict with each other at the same time that they drive toward "the same Carthaginian end." The first is the group he labels the "Abolitionists," those creators of romantic art in literature, painting and music whose dream is to erase the great art of the past and to fill the void with a new consciousness: "So far, the sounds of electronic music are meaningless, like the drippings and droppings of the abstract expressionist and action painters, like the words and images that the beat...
...second destructive influence, says Barzun, is the culture boom itself. "Feeling the old attachment to high Art," Barzun sees in the "very abundance and availability of the democratized arts the causes of a prompt dissolution...The powerful devices of mechanical reproduction and high pressure distribution to which we owe the cultural 'awakening' necessarily distort and thus destroy. All the new media make arbitrary demands on the materials fed through them. And because the public to be served is large and failure costly, it is important that the product suit-hence the endless cutting and adapting, reworking and diluting...
Cornucopious. The very bulk of the output kills appetite, Barzun writes. "Symphonies in bars and cabs, classical drama on television any day of the week, highbrow paperbacks in mountainous profusion (easier to buy than to read), 'art seminars in the home,' capsule operas, 'Chopin by Starlight.' 'The Sound of Wagner,' 'The Best of World Literature'; this cornucopia thrust at the inexperienced and pouring out its contents over us all deadens attention and keeps taste stillborn, like any form of gross feeding. Too much art in too many places means art robbed...
Despite his criticisms, Author Barzun insists that he is not condemning the age, only discerning its fate: "There is nothing to reprove and nothing to bewail." What he calls the total repudiation of Art, he concludes, must mean that "we may suppose the birth of a new consciousness neither far off nor unwelcome. Whatever the time, we have every reason now for believing our artists when they tell us that Art is dead...
...Author Barzun's own wares in the sweetshop include paperback editions of five of his books. He is also a director (along with Fellow Intellectuals Lionel Trilling and W. H. Auden) of the Mid-Century Book Society, a kind of egghead's book-of-the-month club...