Abstract

Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interestsin one word, so anti-poeticas the life of a man in the United States. [Tocqueville];1Anyone who allows the growing respectability of mass culture to seduce him into equating a popular song with modem art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet; anyone who mistakes a triad studded with "dirty notes" for atonality, has already capitulated to barbarism. Art which has degenerated to culture pays the price of being all the more readily confused with its own waste-products as its aberrant influence grows. Education, traditionally the privilege of the few, is paid its due by self-conscious illiteracy which proclaims the stupor of tolerated excess to be the realm of freedom. Rebelling feebly, they are always ready to duck, following the lead of jazz, which integrates stumbling and coming-too-soon into the collective march lock-step. [Adorno]