What is the gloss that art and culture add to a society? Is there a definitive American art form? What have been the points of reference for U.S. culture, and how is culture redefining itself today, specifically on the landscape of society -- our highly technological world? Cultural historian Morris Dickstein, Director of the Center for the Humanities, City University Graduate Center (CUNY) and Distinguished Professor of English and Theater at CUNY's Queens College, reflects on the contemporary arts scene and its historical and literary underpinnings in this dialogue with Michael J. Bandler.

Q: To begin with, in very basic terms, what does art mean to a society?

A: The artistic culture is society's examination of itself. It's the way it reflects on its own values, the way it contemplates itself. We also associate culture with leisure. It shows that a society is not all work -- that it has an appreciation of beauty and elements of self-understanding, that presumably it can even change its way of behaving in the future. Culture is criticism in the form of imitation. It's amusement, but also contemplation. It's entertainment, but also it's insight.

Q: Focusing specifically on the arts in the United States, can we pinpoint what American art is, and perhaps how it has been shaped?

A: Some of the arts in the United States were slow to develop. For example, although there was painting in the 18th century, it looks like provincial English painting, with a few distinguished talents like John Singleton Copley. New American painting from the early 19th century is very primitive-looking. It seems like folk art. Only in the middle of the 19th century did the visual arts begin to evolve, with the great American landscape painters like Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church and the Hudson River School -- and especially with the development of American realistic painting. There were those like Winslow Homer, who worked as an illustrator for Harper's, was sent down to cover the U.S. Civil War, and gradually developed his own style and his own interest in nature and culture, out of his commercial work. Similarly, Thomas Eakins went to Europe, seemed pretty much impervious to the new developments in European art, gradually developed his own style of portraiture in the United States, a genuinely new form of realism. In the 20th century, with the Ashcan School, you began to get realistic painters like Edward Hopper who were influenced by modernist and abstract developments, and integrated them into realistic representation.

Basically, the American arts took off when they began to break with European models, even though they were influenced by them. And they connected with elements that really existed only in the United States -- for example, the growth of truly modern cities, the tremendous expanse of nature, the openness of the land, the movement westward, and later the influx of immigration, which created the tremendous variety of the U.S. population. This country never makes absolute distinctions between high and low art that you sometimes have in Europe. An illustrator like Frederic Remington, with whom we associate a lot of our images of the West and cowboys, and who made a tremendous impact on "western" films in this century, exists in that indeterminate space between popular illustrator and serious artist.

Q: You mentioned a moment ago the severing of ties with European models. That has taken place in all the art forms.

A: Yes. The great articulate spokesman for this was Ralph Waldo Emerson, of course, with the idea that the United States had to create a new culture, with new beginnings, and not be dependent on European culture -- though Emerson himself was fascinated by European culture. Then, when Walt Whitman came along, Emerson wrote his famous letter acclaiming Whitman as a new force in the world. You might say that Whitman and Henry David Thoreau were the first to try to enact the Emersonian program, but there have been many, many artists and writers who later found their own ways of doing it.

Q: Let's apply this same theory to music for a moment.

A: Some of the most interesting American artists -- even if they weren't recognized in their time -- are the ones who would mix advanced developments in art with what you might call populist elements of the folk culture. A composer like Charles Ives is a real American original and also was a great reader of and believer in Emerson. He even built one of his best known works, the "Concord Sonata", around Emerson and his circle. And you get equivalent examples in the other arts.

Q: Stephen Foster is another original, I should think.

A: Sure. You can't really separate the art song from the popular song in the United States.

Q: Besides the influences of nature and the land, what else has affected culture in the United States?

A: We shouldn't underestimate the importance of regional differences and the growth of a varied urban population. But the other great influence on American artists of all types -- as Alfred Kazin has shown in his recent book, <>I>God and the American Writer -- is religion. It's usually not an orthodox religion. But it's often very self-created. The great example of this in the 19th century is Emily Dickinson, who was constantly wrestling in a very heterodox way with her New England background, and developed a very original, existential set of religious views that were extremely modern and -- as with many American artists -- ahead of their time and only fully appreciated generations later.

Q: To go back for a moment to the visual arts, you had that religious focus in the works of Cole and others.

A: Right. The so-called "luminist" painters definitely had a kind of transcendental -- if not orthodox religious -- element in their work, suggested by the use of light as well as the responses to nature itself. There also was a high level of theatricality in their paintings. Some were sent around the world and staged as shows in themselves.

Q: Dance, of course, is another art that reflected a break between Europe and the New World, in the personages of George Balanchine and Martha Graham. And Graham went back to religion and nature -- two elements you've cited -- with her Shaker piece and Appalachian Spring.

A: These were done during a populist period in U.S. culture, the Thirties and Forties. There were modern dancers in the United States even before Graham, but without her intensity and determination. Reflecting the intermingling with Europe as well as the break with its traditions, you had a great emigre choreographer like Balanchine stripping away a lot of the ornamental and theatrical elements of the Russian ballet tradition. One of the first pieces he did here was Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, for a Broadway musical, On Your Toes [composed by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart]. A lot of Europeans who came here were even more fascinated by elements of the American mythology and American life than Americans themselves. Many Americans -- especially New Englanders -- looked to Europe as having a superior culture, and looked down on U.S. culture. But that was rarely the mistake of Europeans, who generally weren't that interested in our high culture, but were fascinated by the much more native elements. The Bohemian composer Antonin Dvorak, of course, is a famous early example.

Q: You had the school of artists and musicians -- Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, and writers like Ernest Hemingway -- who were in Europe in the Twenties.

A: The fashion in the Twenties was to go to Europe, and to fall under the influence of European modernism. Certainly the early Copland works are much more modernist than the music he began to write in the Thirties and Forties, such as Billy The Kid, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man and other pieces that had much more populist elements in them. There was also the tremendously sophisticated show music of the Twenties and Thirties by George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern.

Q: You've been talking about high and mass -- or populist -- culture. Have the lines always blurred?

A: It was only in the Fifties that a handful of intellectuals tried to make very sharp distinctions between high-cult, mid-cult and mass-cult, but that broke down very quickly, because it didn't really reflect the realities even of modern writing. Modernists themselves did not recognize that distinction between high and popular culture. T.S. Eliot was influenced by the music halls. Franz Kafka was fascinated by the Yiddish theater. Samuel Beckett was a great fan of Buster Keaton movies.

Q: The modernist tendency would seem to have had a rocky run in U.S. culture. Is that a fair statement?

A: Each of the arts had elements of modernism that were brilliantly experimental, but not what you would call "user-friendly." In music, for instance, a lot of modernist elements were meant to clear the air of some of the cliches of late 19th -century composition -- Tschaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and so on. It was like a cleansing of the palate, getting rid of the older forms of sentimentality and melodicism, and attempting a cleaner version of the satisfactions that 19th -century narrative and music provided to the audience. It's interesting how in today's music, there's been much more of a return -- not exactly in the same way -- to old-fashioned tonality. At this moment, it seems to me that most drastically experimental trends have receded. You look at a composer like Philip Glass, who used very limited elements in his early work, which were almost strictly repetitive and rhythmic, like a subway train on an interminable journey. Now they're much more melodic. There is a great vogue of opera now, not only among composers who are trying to create works that will hold the stage, but among poets, many of whom have been writing librettos -- like J.D. McClatchy, with Tobias Picker's Emmeline. There's more of an interest in finding the points of intersection among the arts, and opera has always been the place where different art forms -- staging, visual spectacle, music, drama -- have intersected.

Q: The arts have been a political flashpoint for ages, probably going back to the Greeks. Why?

A: The arts have always had a political dimension. They deal with life and culture, and politics is part of that. During the modernist period, there were attempts to impose a rigorous aestheticism, but these have really broken down. In some of the arts, there is a tendency to go to the other extreme. For example, some of the recent Whitney annuals [exhibitions] have been largely political art. In fact, one of them had virtually no painting or sculpture. It was almost all conceptual art -- video, written texts -- things that were really commentary art, primarily on questions of race and gender. They were almost like visual essays, which had no strong visual appeal, but really were ideas being thrown at the spectator. I don't think this has much of a future. Visual art that has little visual appeal is doomed to be transient.

Part of it is the effect of post-modernism. Arthur Danto, the critic, has been developing the idea that starting with things like Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, you really saw the end of art, that the aesthetic presuppositions of art no longer operated, and that anything that a museum or gallery placed on a wall was to be declared art. But it was really art that parodied art, or commented on the nature of art or the end of art. A lot of this was very thin stuff. The old tendency of the avant-garde to try to find new movements and new directions in each generation suddenly turned into novelties every two or three years.

I should also point out that one of the problems in culture today is that a whole creative generation has passed from the scene. This is certainly true in literature, in which the Depression generation and the World War II generation have more or less disappeared. In the 1980s alone, almost all the great masters of the American short story -- John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Bernard Malamud -- died, leaving only John Updike as a great short story writer. I think the same thing has been happening throughout the arts. Both the abstract expressionist and pop art generations are gone. That World War II generation had a real forty- year run. So there was a scurrying around. This was followed by a search for new directions with misfires and much absurdity, and a bad influence of postmodern theory that argued that everything had been done, that there was no such thing as individual identity or individual forms of self-expression, that parody and pastiche and imitation were the only things left for artistic latecomers. For a time, this was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Q: But now, the picture seems brighter in certain disciplines -- in music, as you pointed out earlier, and in theater. Even Arthur Miller and Edward Albee are still hard at work.

A: Of course, but we associate Miller and Albee mainly with their earlier dramas. Yet it's true that there's really a bright young theatrical generation on the scene. It's probably because of the strength of regional theater, no longer dependent on Broadway, that has taken the place of the old network of out-of-town tryouts. You have the equivalent in film with the independents, where a lot of talent is being developed away from the mainstream.

Q: We haven't really spoken about film, actually, within the context of the evolution of the arts we've been discussing.

A: The main thing we've seen in film is the growth of the global culture, and the atrophy of some national cinemas that were very important in the world -- the British cinema, the Italian cinema, to a lesser extent the French cinema -- and the tremendous domination of the markets of these countries by the Hollywood product. Going along with this, to a great extent, is the dumbing-down of the Hollywood product to make it internationally palatable -- much less characterization, less language, much more action. Of course, Hollywood has always been good at certain things -- technology, special effects, production values. But this has led to a narrower kind of global cinema. I've always felt that the more monolithic any culture becomes, the more marginal elements will appear in order to challenge it. I think that the independent cinema has come along not only to challenge the cliches of Hollywood, but really to replace the old art cinema that we associated with European film. A lot of the young directors of today grew up on the new talents of the Sixties -- Godard, Truffaut, Bu��el -- and young Americans like Martin Scorsese and Brian DePalma in the Seventies. Sometimes the younger filmmakers seem to be imitating them, but very often they're quite creative in mixing these earlier techniques with elements of their own background, whether they grew up on Long Island [New York State] or in California.

Q: Of course, you also have the helter-skelter influence of the MTV [music videos for television] generation and television commercials in Hollywood studio films.

A: The commercial world is almost an extreme example of the energy and technical innovation that you get in the Hollywood cinema. The problem is that often the MTV techniques do not mesh very well with a continuous storyline, or a depth of characterization. It's been hard for some of the younger filmmakers to rediscover those traditional values. I know someone who teaches film in California. He always assigns his students 19th -century novels to read, rather than having them see too many movies. They'll never learn narrative structure from other movies, but they will learn it from reading great novels.

Q: Commercials and MTV also have shortened our attention span.

A: Speed is one of the things that has affected television. The use of hand-held cameras on dramatic series like "Homicide", or the way that not one, but two or three different narrative strands are woven together on shows like "Law and Order" or "E.R." -- in many ways, television is more advanced than movies or other popular cultures, which is a reverse of the way it used to be. On the other hand, some of the British television dramatic series and adaptations of the classics which have such a strong audience here actually represent a reaction against this speed, and a nostalgia for the older, more leisurely kind of storytelling.

Q: So here we are in the modern world, with instant access and gratification, communications overload, obsolescence, and the Internet.

A: Some of this is partly responsible for the jagged rhythm that's come into a lot of new art forms. We've also seen the creation of a new topical art, with so much on television, in the movies and the theater based on things that were in the headlines two or three years earlier -- something like Freedomland, the new Richard Price novel, for example [centered on a carjacking and a subsequent high-visibility trial that turns into a media circus]. The media covers events so thoroughly that they quickly become part of the national mythology. We're going to see the ripple effects of the O.J. Simpson trial, for example, in a number of the arts, in which people will create something expressing their feelings but perhaps with little resemblance to the outcome of the original case.

Basically, we're living in a media-saturated environment. Media representations become part of the primary experience of people living in our culture today. The Internet is only going to multiply that manyfold, especially as we begin to integrate the Internet with films and other forms of representation. The electronic reality has become such a major part of contemporary life, something that artists are responding to, and trying to integrate into their work.