Word: croce
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Jones made no formal reply. He didn't have to. Critics, journalists, cultural commentators of all sorts, many of whom haven't been to a ballet or a modern-dance concert in years, reached for the sword. Most took Croce to task for not seeing the work (though, of course, if she had not made the provocative gesture of writing about a work she refused to see, her piece would have lost some of its eclat). New York Times columnist Frank Rich laid down the lines of the dialogue on the op-ed page. "aids is responsible for yanking death...
Village Voice executive editor Richard Goldstein put Croce "under the aegis of the Great Newt, [where] a traditionalist may safely rage against the rise of minorities." Conservative art critic Hilton Kramer saw things differently, calling the piece "the most definitive essay on the arts in the 1990s that any American critic has yet written ... a landmark in the cultural history...
Last week's issue of the New Yorker kept the pot bubbling by printing a dozen letters, several solicited, from cultural pillars of various persuasions. Tony Kushner, author of the Pulitzer-prizewinning Angels in America, said he felt "dissed." Croce, he argued, has her semantics wrong; she uses the word victims to describe "politically engaged progressive people." Libertarian terror Camille Paglia largely agreed with Croce but seized the occasion to chide her for not paying proper attention to the pop heroes Paglia champions. In short, the powwow was predictable but entertaining...
...several reasons why the piece became combustible. For one, the New Yorker under editor Tina Brown has developed a knack for getting itself talked about, and this piece was placed up front in the issue, not back in the critical ghetto. For another, the article was well timed. Croce used it to deplore what she considers the politicization of National Endowment for the Arts grants and the effects of political correctness on the arts in general. To Croce, a conservative, a work of art should be judged by its realization of truth and beauty, not its adaptability to an agenda...
...Croce, of course, insists that her essay was occasioned only by the Still/Here tour, but both she and Jones are conscious of political influences at work in the controversy. "This is really a little scuffle," Jones told Time, "but I wonder about the winds blowing around in the country-whether there isn't a plan of retrenchment we can't even see." As for Croce, she was disgusted that "some of the angriest responses have come from people who think the Republican victory emboldened me to write this. I have been thinking about Bill T. Jones for years...