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"...geniuses usually come into their own only after displacing some pseudo-artist whom contemporaries called great. We may be most conscious of this in painting because we have the word "academic" to denote that appalling competence which so readily outshines true art. But the trick succeeds in every art, until the day when the glamour suddenly pales and the new generation wonders how "taste", "the best taste", could admire such patent emptiness. One answer is; the emptiness helped make the work a playground for familiar feelings; the fraudulent sincerity and skill was a snare which caught both artist and public. So it remains a question whether such practioners can claim our sympathy in the name of their devoted but luckless striving. Formerly the question would not have arisen at all, because their lesser numbers would have led unpretentious lives as craftsmen. Today, the crafts having succumbed to the machine, these men must be Shakespeare or nothing.

"....there is no reason why they or anyone else should feel that their competitive position is unjust and intolerable. Exactly as the entertainers must compete for trade, the mediocre who turn art into a profession must compete for the managerial posts of artistic big business. Why should this type of practitioner be favored over the lawyer or the engineer? Why subsidies or a guaranteed monopoly? The only claim strong enough to upset the normal order is the claim of genius. But this is precisely the claim that is hardest to validate and that professional mediocrity is almost the last to recognize. Their record in history should make them modest, though they never are, and it is they who, in any Government Bureau of Fine Arts, will hold, for themselves and their friends, the monopoly of supplying the nation with artifacts that might have passed for new fifty years ago." Prof. Jacques BARZUN

"For my part, I have not the slightest objection to the use of public funds to make up certain deficits in the finances of going concerns - orchestras, theaters, museums and libraries, whose traditions are set and whose management remains in private hands. But any iniative or any participation in the conduct of the fine arts is another matter. For it raises the delicate and sometimes sinister questions of quality,tastes genres, and vested interests. ...government will not be dealing with the artist of our dreams, but with a lot of miscellaneous citizens working at the arts...."

POPULAR ART (bestsellers in any field) "The supposed harm done by these tradesmen seems to me quite imaginary, and the argument against, let us say, popular literature, is actually an argument against mankind as it has been through the ages. Already in Horace's day, the complaint was that the superficial and flashy crowdedout the good; and certainly since the invention of printing the law of publishing has been that good books tend to bring no profits until long after the authors death." BARZUN