In a bleak but prescient book, Leonard Meyer argues that the collapse of
“high”art into formalism and constructivism, exemplified by academic
coterie serialism in music, is virtually inevitable in modernity, since vernacu-
lar life is dominated by industrial routine, and no cultivation of individual
selfhood is any longer possible in relation to it. Outside academically formal
and constructive works, there are only more or less vulgar entertainments
and empty gestures. In music apart from serialism there is only either purely
vernacular“tribal music”(rock and pop),“ambient music”(elevator music),
and“transcendental particularist music” (John Cage’s music as“sounds
heard at a bus stop”or any sounds as a focus of Zen attention).^87 “Ours,”
Meyer concludes,“is and will remain a Brownian-motion culture”^88 with
little possibility of significant individual achievements of meaningfulness in
relation to social actuality. Social actuality is too divided, contested, frag-
mented, incoherent, and dominated by commerce for that.
Yet however incoherent and contested social actuality is, it continues also
to offer materials of life for clarification and problems for art to address:
subject matters to be presented as a focus for thought and emotional atti-
tude, distinctively fused to the imaginative exploration of material. It is hard
to imagine that human beings will stop caring about this and hard to believe
that success in this enterprise is impossible. Jazz (from Armstrong to Col-
trane, and beyond), modern through-composed music that engages with the
vernacular (from Stravinsky to Shostakovich and Rorem, and beyond), the
modern novel (from Joyce and Faulkner to Morrison, Pynchon, Rushdie, and
beyond), dance (from Balanchine to Tharp, Morris, and beyond) and modern
movies (from Renoir and Hitchcock to Herzog and Scorsese, and beyond) all
testify along with many other practices to the continuing power of art to
come to life in relation to social actuality.
(^87) Leonard B. Meyer,Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century
Culture, new edn (University of Chicago Press, 1994). See especially chapter 5,“The End of
the Renaissance?,”pp. 68–84, and“Postlude,”pp. 317–49.
(^88) Ibid., p. 349.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 283