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What's Happened to the Arts

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In 1952, the "Partisan Review," one of America's oldest literary and cultural journals, asked American intellectuals to assess the effects of the rise of communism, the Cold War, and America's emerging economic superiority. Fifty years after the 1952 conference, the "Partisan Review" held another conference titled "Our Country, Our Culture" to assess once again how the American society and its relationship with the rest of the world has changed in the last half-century.

On this week's show, we featured two presentations given at this conference by painter and sculptor Jules Olitski and theatre critic Robert Brustein on the question of "What Happened to the Arts?"

In his presentation titled "About Barley Soup and Art - High and Low," Olitski argues that today's postmodern art is "anti-art, meant to sneer at taste, high art and aesthetic quality" and will discuss what motivates such art.

Brustein's presentation, titled "The Four Horsemen of the Cultural Apocalypse," points out that finances and ideological stances such as political and moral correctness are compromising the quality and direction of arts today.

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