Art for Art’s Sake

TERRY TEACHOUT is that rare thing: a cultural critic who believes in free markets. But he is also a free-marketeer who believes that the market has coarsened American culture. He writes occasionally about pop culture, even at times celebrates it, but he insists that standards exist–that Schubert is better than The Sopranos.

A Terry Teachout Reader is a selection from fifteen years’ worth of essays, mostly from the New York Times, Commentary, the New Criterion, and National Review (and THE WEEKLY STANDARD, as well). Teachout is one of America’s most thoughtful critics. He’s also one of its most polymathic. He writes about everything: music, dance, theater, literature, painting, film, television.

Nowhere is Teachout more different than his colleagues, perhaps, than in his reason for believing art important. It is, put simply, that art transcends this world. Art’s unity, Teachout argues, “reminds us of the hidden presence of superworldly order amid the seeming chaos of our wounded world.” This explains why Teachout is so good on the “conversion” of America’s foremost chronicler of materialism, Tom Wolfe, and why he can say, in an essay about the western actor Randolph Scott: “This message rings truer still as we look back on a century that might have been designed for the sole purpose of dramatizing the truth of Dostoyevsky’s terrible warning, ‘If there is no God, then anything is permitted, even cannibalism.'”

Marilyn Monroe knew Randolph Scott, of course, but she also knew of Dostoyevsky. At least she said she did, but that broad culture–in which one had at least to pretend to have read Dostoyevsky–died not long after she did. “I grew up in the Age of the Middlebrow, that earnest, self-improving fellow who watched prime-time documentaries and read the Book of the Month,” Teachout writes. “That was me, in spades.”

The middlebrow culture of the mid-century brought New York to Teachout’s own small-town Missouri. It brought art to places without galleries or even bookstores. The Book-of-the-Month Club, for example, brought to Teachout such books as Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, and Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. Ed Sullivan brought America not only Elvis Presley, but also ballerina Margot Fonteyn and diva Maria Callas, who performed a scene from Tosca, fully staged.

One of the other virtues of middlebrow culture was that it was popular. Everybody watched The Ed Sullivan Show. Everybody knew who Norman Mailer was. All Americans, to a certain extent, participated in a shared culture, and this culture in turn unified America. To be “American” really meant something, culturally. Now, Teachout argues, culture has become atomized, catering to every possible niche interest. Many free-marketeers, especially libertarians, applaud this new cultural diversity. But not Teachout: “The information age offers something for anybody: Survivor for simpletons, The Sopranos for sophisticates. The problem is that it offers nothing for everybody.” Teachout misses Midcult, despite its pretension, social climbing, and eat-your-peas ponderousness.

Thus it happens that a man who loves the work of George Balanchine also celebrates the Three Tenors. Along with the schmaltz, after all, the Tenors bring Verdi and Puccini to a mass audience. Teachout warns us of the dangers of romanticizing middlebrow culture, but it’s hard to see his cheerleading for the Pavarotti-Domingo-Carreras combine as anything but that. He admits that they have not created a new audience for the moribund classical music industry. In fact, the Tenors’ great success paved the way for the utter triumph of the “crossover act”–classical musicians (and not so classical, like Donny Osmond) peddling pop piffle to audiences that don’t know Mozart from Mahler. The crossover act is usually skinny, sexy, scantily clad, and callow–and almost always under thirty. They are far more likely to cite Céline Dion than Maria Callas as an influence. The Three Tenors never encouraged their fans to broaden their knowledge of music; they only encouraged the ostensible guardians of that heritage to pander to the people in a futile attempt to sell more records. So perhaps the culture is not so atomized as Teachout thinks. Every musician, from classical to country, must now incorporate pop to sell records.

But how good would a critic be if one never disagreed with him? Teachout, no matter the subject, is always thoughtful, frequently charming, and sometimes as doughty as an Old Testament prophet. To collect a critic between hard covers is to test whether he is more than ephemeral. A Terry Teachout Reader passes that test. In spades.

Kelly Jane Torrance is arts and culture editor of Brainwash.