The Rout of the Muses

The Crisis of Authority in the Fine Arts
by R. V. Young

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) submitted to an art exhibit in New York City as a sculpture a urinal he had purchased in a plumbing supply store; he entitled it Fountain and signed it “R. Mutt.” In 1952, John Cage (1912–1992) offered as a musical composition 4’33”, in which a pianist sits motionless at the keyboard for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds and then gets up and leaves—presumably to rapturous applause. In 2021, Amanda Gorman (1998–) read at the inauguration of President Joseph Biden a poem entitled “The Hill We Climb,” in which standard English grammar and usage, along with poetic meter and ordinary logic, are reduced to a state of verbal deliquescence. Such travesties have been concocted, across all the arts, for more than a century: men and women are being richly rewarded with pelf and prominence for producing what is not simply bad art but phenomena whose status as “art” in any reasonable sense of the term is problematic.

This failure to discriminate between what counts as serious, not to say, legitimate art and what is merely ephemeral or even anti-art is not confined to the progressive, the politically correct, and the woke. Consider, for example, a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal (August 5–6, 2023), which devotes an entire, full-size newsprint page to “the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop” and the controversy over whether “Kool Herc” or “Grandmaster Flash” is the true progenitor. The article is the work of Dan Charnas, who is associate professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and the author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. About the same time, National Review (August 11, 2023) featured a lengthy, rather solemn review of 1964: Eyes of the Storm, a coffee-table volume of photographs by Paul McCartney taken during the Beatles’ first tour of the United States. The same issue of National Review includes two articles worrying about whether the film Barbie is liberal or conservative. Perhaps the mildest comment one might venture is that our serious journals of news and opinion have lost their sense of propriety and priority.

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R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

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