The gold standard.(A Terry Teachout Reader)(Book Review)

A Terry Teachout Reader (Yale, 438 pp., $35)

Some critics hope to revive beauty, others high culture, but it is a curious thing that any hopes to revive both. Beauty is immediately accessible, and thus, from the perspective of high culture, heretical. Like the orthodoxies of high modernism--serialism in music, Bauhaus in architecture, abstraction in painting, free verse in poetry--high culture demands discipline, hard work, and self-denial. An ascetic as well as an aesthetic discipline, it inures the audience to the cheap grace of pleasant images.

Though the 20th-century priests of high culture--T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Dwight Macdonald--preached modernism, they believed an ancient religion. Like Plato, they feared that their flock might confuse mere representations with the real thing. Like Plato, they were forthrightly elitist, which explains the otherwise puzzling affinity of the would-be Trotskyite vanguard of Partisan Review contributors for the reactionary bootstrap-aristocrat T. S. Eliot. Unlike Plato, however, they unwittingly succeeded--at least if one judges by the near-total irrelevance today of new poetry, painting, and music--in banning the poets from the city.

A small-town American by birth and jazz bassist by training, Terry Teachout lives by a different creed. He has applied his formidable critical acumen not only to string quartets, ballets, and novels, but also to movies, TV shows, cartoons, and musicals. Unlike more radical critics, however, whose limicolous pop-culture wallowing subverts all sense of propriety, he tirelessly upholds the existence of standards. But, unlike many traditionalists in the aesthetic culture wars, he refuses to see high and low as synonyms of good and bad. In contrast to Teachout's respectful yet ironical detachment from middle-class life, the 20th-century priests of high culture evinced in their very anti-bourgeois stance a too-bourgeois sincerity. Is there not in high culture, after all, a hint of the middle class's own worldly asceticism, Protestant iconoclasm, and rejection of aristocratic luxury? Expecting the artist to do all the work smacks of feudal indolence; capitalism demands that the audience do just as much work, if not more.

To be sure, there is real beauty, or at least real sublimity, in the best of modern art. But the beauty of, say, the Seagram building differs from that of Giotto's bell tower; that of The Waste Land from that of The Divine Comedy; that of a Mondrian from that of a Raphael. The later works have an almost purely noetic beauty that cannot long sustain the soul. When poetry, for example, becomes nothing but a pastiche of allusive figures and erudite cryptograms, you can be sure that as an art form it is finished. If the great modernists still loom over us like Titans, it is only because they actually succeeded in convincing us, in Eliot's words, that "this [i.e., modernism] is the way the world ends." Ye shall know them by their fruits: While a second-rate Palladian villa, Petrarchan sonnet, or piano sonata can still please, the knock-offs of great modernist works remain dreadful beyond description.

Likewise, there really is something execrable in lowbrow kitsch and sentimentality. But modernism did not merely fail to abolish these things; by abandoning the production of beauty to the mass media, it made them ubiquitous. Some critics have redoubled their efforts to put the Humpty Dumpty of high culture back together again; Teachout, by contrast, sees in pop culture its own corrective. Our best artists, he observes, were such All-Americans as Charles Ives, Louis Armstrong, Aaron Copland, Willa Cather, Chuck Jones, and Tom Wolfe--all of whom "ennobled popular culture even as they ...