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What are the "high arts"


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{When I decided to post a reply, I thought I’d make it short. But I can't do it. It always end up sounding like a German Professor. Maybe that’s what I should have done for a living – my German isn’t good enough, though.}

I’m going to make some disconnected points about music because I know it better than other art forms.

A lot of what we think about as high art now was meant to be popular at the time of its creation. Mozart’s operas, certainly large parts of The Magic Flute, were intended for a popular non-aristocratic audience. The Marriage of Figaro was a huge hit in Prague, where, Mozart reported, everybody – even the street vendors - were whistling the tunes. If these works were primarily popular, and didn’t have “serious” or “sublime” parts, we probably wouldn’t be hearing them now. But Mozart needed to make a living by them, so he included popular (simple, easily understood, familiar) elements. In all cases of Mozart’s writing, popular and more serious, the craft – how well he made the music – was very high.

Leigh mentioned German Lieder and that made me think of Schubert, who wrote many songs intended to be popular – with folk like tunes and simple accompaniments. But he also, in both the middle and late parts of his short career, wrote songs of the same length (3-5 minutes) and combined them into song cycles, which are clearly the highest art. In these cycles, we’re following the progress of a life, not just experiencing moments of it. The world the creator wants to describe is larger than can be described in a short song. Maybe high art aspires to encompass more of life than middle or low art.

Farrell Fan mentioned that Jazz is now considered high art. But I want to say that the Jazz I’ve heard that strives to the status of high art simply doesn’t make it. (Just me opinion, now) That Jazz has gotten too far from it’s roots, which are African-American folk music and popular song, and sounds stretched out and cleaned up for Sunday brunch. But I don’t get the same feeling when Bach includes Lutheran church chorales in the St. Matthew Passion. Somehow, he elevates these from their ordinary every Sunday use to a very high spiritual plane, so that even a convinced non-believer like me can have a deep religious feeling listening to them. Here, there is great depth and intensity of feeling and expression. For art to be “high” it’s got to have that at least some of the time.

Now I’m going to dare to talk about a dancer (don’t kill me). Fred Astaire, who is a great, great dancer, but dances in a light, popular style, can’t produce high art. Because although he’s incredibly technically gifted and has the highest level of craft, his art doesn’t aspire to describe or embody a large part of life, and he doesn’t express much more than the fun and grace of beautiful movement.

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4T's - your comments put me in happy remembrance of The Abduction From the Seraglio. Mozart moves from street songs and low comedy to the most subtle group arias, and it's all suffused with genius. And the form he was working in (singspiel) was not considered high art at the time, was it?

OK - can we take a deep breath, bite the bullet and dare to come up with some concise, definitive statements on High Art?

Here's mine - feel free to disagree, this is a hypothesis, not an Olympian Thunderbolt.

High Art is not immediately accessible, because one of the things that makes an art High Art is an assumption of cultural fluency.

What I mean by that is that all the things I can think of as high art, whether fairly or not, operate under the premise that you have a good grasp of the culture that produced it. They have a lingo, like ballet does, and their standards of quality are not immediately intuitive. There's more to good or bad ballet than "I liked it" or "I didn't". It's knowing about musicality, line, proportion.

There's an entire can of worms to this, because you can use this fluency as a sort of Secret Handshake to let people in and keep other people out. And there is the battle for who controls and is the arbiter of High Art, because it is no longer about quality, but about defining the elite. And then art becomes politics.

What do people think?

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I don't know if it makes "high art" or not, but many things produced as light entertainment have been treated with a near sanctity that compromises their author's original intent. Since we've mentioned Mozart, let's start there. "Seraglio", "Cosi fan Tutte" and "Magic Flute" were real knockabout comedies, with the last-named being a true singspiel (musical comedy) with a libretto by Emanuel Schickaneder. Schickaneder was his period's equivalent of Jerry Lewis, but over the years, one would have thought that he was St. Augustine or something, the productions have been so "respectful". The D'Oyly Carte Opera found themselves in a similar bind, eventually even losing their home theater, the Savoy in London, and were "exiled" to Birmingham. The productions of Gilbert and Sullivan opéras-comiques had become so stale and frozen that they lost their broad appeal. Keeping the original spirit of the operas was the imperative, not the preservation of Gilbert's blocking, good though it was.

Losing a "culture optic" by directors and producers is often the root cause of stodginess in production, but some sort of balance must be struck between the preservation of the original spirit and the preservation of the original artistry of a work. Joe Papp's infamous production of The Pirates of Penzance comes to mind when I think of "updated" productions that lose the intent of the creators. And I've already had my licks at Nutcracker elsewhere, so I won't go there again.

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4Ts, I agree with you on both Jazz and Fred Astaire -- I think what's happened there is that most people confuse "high art" with "good." Say, "Fred Astaire is an example of popular art, not high art" and someone will scream HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT BARYSHNIKOV SAID HE WAS THE GREATEST DANCER EVER.

I also agree with 4Ts statement:

If these works were primarily popular, and didn’t have “serious” or “sublime” parts, we probably wouldn’t be hearing them now.

Yes, high art, especially theatrical art, always had popular elements -- it had to appeal to a broad range of people. But it's done within the accepted form of what was high art at the time. Beethoven wrote waltzes and country dances to be danced at balls; these weren't intended to be high art.

Leigh, I think that art has been used as politics, and I think contemporary artists are, in effect, using art as a secret handshake ("Tee hee. They won't be able to understand this, the idiots.") But I don't think this is what the dread Dead White European Males did. Way way back -- and still in some Asian classical forms -- art was to honor the gods, or God, and you gave him the best you had. What we have today descends from forms created then, and refined and refined over the centuries. Now we have to apologize for this? Not me.

It occured to me watching "The Pianist" that the American attitude towards the high arts -- fear, disdain, discomfort -- might trace back to World War II. Before then, there was the notion that being educated included being educated in the arts. Symposium, lectures for the edification of young ladies and gentlemen, all that was a part of American middle-class culture. But after World War II, there were many articles written about how, if culture was so great, Naziism happened. One of the Nazi stereotypes is the SS officer who loves music, poetry, opera and ballet and then goes to work and tortures people with obvious pleasure. There must be something horrible about art -- or, at best, it cannot innoculate us against evil. It's a fraud -- it don't make you cultured. It just makes you mean.

We're still living with that. I think it's time to get beyond it.

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I agree that the art itself can be separated from the politics that swirls around it, and I'm with you on the cases that it should.

But I think the politics of art does merit discussion; it's fascinating. (Yes, it's also potentially rancorous. I hope people will accept my arguments as being in the spirit of discussion, rather than polemic. Feel free to offer other views!)

I think American distrust of high art goes back well before WWII. Its roots to me are in the question of how "European" we want to become. I think you see this chafing more and more, especially at present, with polls that show our nation more than twice as religious as Europe, and a longstanding distrust of centralized government. Religion is no barrier to high art, obviously. I bring in that statistic to show a place where our culture strongly diverges from Europe. I think the distrust of centralized government is; it means that the most labor-intensive art forms have to turn to sources other than state funding - and the purse (and unified power) of the state has been important to ballet since Louis XIV.

There's more to it than statism versus federalism. The American response to anything suggesting elitism or any sort of tiered society has been schizophrenic. We bestow celebrity on people, and retract it with equal glee. I don't think you can separate egalitarianism from the American psyche. The myth here, for better and worse, is that anyone can do anything. At its best, it makes for opportunity. At its worst, it celebrates the norm. High art requires specialized knowledge not only to do it, but even to appreciate it. In America, that renders it deeply suspect.

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Just a brief word -- I agree that it predates World War II; I didn't mean to imply anything different; I was addressing a subset of the mistrust. Mistrust of art in America goes back to the Puritans and there's always been a strain of it. There have been many books written about this. What I'm talking about the mistrust of art from within the middle-class, from within the class of arts consumers, in Newspeak :P It's the Lyceum movement families (the great-grandchildren of 19th century people who attended those lectures and concerts with not only pleasure, but the notion that edification was a societal good) who turned their backs on art in the late '40s and early '50s. I don't think it's a coincidence that pop art -- pop music, television, etc. -- rose to the fore at this time.

I was struck by treefrog's comment above, about being raised in a highly educated household that didn't partake of the arts -- I think that says it. If one was raised in such a household, the arts were, somehow, a part of one's world, even if one didn't attend them. Maybe your grandmother used to go to the theater and your great uncle Claude to the symphony -- this was part of your inheritance -- like the china :D (I came from the opposite -- a family that sent its children to private high schools but not to college, yet did partake of the arts, especially theater and music. Two different views of the middle class.)

I also agree that the "how European do we want to be" question has long haunted us. We argue both sides of it. We do NOT want to be European. We're better. Superior in every way. We're more free, BIGGER, we can do anything, we're reinventing art. We don't need any of that arcane, prissy, elitist angst. To lump all the stereotypes into one bin :) But then the other side, our insecurity, shows when an American wins a European competition (the Van Cliburn syndrome). Suddenly all that arcane stuff has value because we've won and we're gonna beat 'em. Or when we have someone in the public eye -- Jacqueline Kennedy is a good example -- who passes the Culture Test, there will be articles written, with pride, about how well she did at diplomatic dinner parties. So I definitely think we're conflicted about this.

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Re the politics of art -- is this another area where two separate issues are often confused? There's the Canon (Dead White European Males) issue, especially the "who gets to choose?" that addresses issues of the past. That's one aspect of so-called elitism. And the other aspect is what several people have mentioned, that late 20th century artists either deliberately avoided "the public" or addressed only "the public" whereas artists in previous eras had been trained in methods, forms and rules that had been arrived at by consensus (or, in some instances, an Academy) among artists and those who pursued higher education as a profession.

I still think there is a consensus, although it is becoming a more complicated one. And I know that Andy Warhol's "Art is whatever I say it is" (which really means "art is whatever I can get away wiith") is very seductive, but I still think there is a consensus. The artists/academics are often a generation ahead of the general populace in this simply because they live in that world and thnk about those issues night and day, and so see the change as it's occurring rather than confronting it on the odd Saturday night a few times a year, when it seems shocking.

Editing to add -- I agree with Leigh that politics is a part of this and is certainly a valid topic of discussion. Relativists welcome, too :P

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I just found out about this thread, and I know I'm getting in at the tail end of the conversation, but I think you've all made some very good points. I tend to think we do art a disservice by lumping it all into one category (art is art) and whatever meaning each person derives from it (or assigns to it) is a legitimate interpretation. I don't really know enough about ballet to comment (though so far that isn't stopping me). I know only slightly more about literature, so I know this debate also surrounds written works. When does a novel become literature? When it has historical value? Social significance? Literary devices?

Alexandra mentioned earlier that appreciation of art is dependent on education. I agree that education is often a factor in understanding the significance of written work. Anyone slogging through one of James Fenimore Cooper's books may wonder how his meandering story-telling skills can be classified as "literature." Yet he not only captures a piece of American history that may otherwise be lost but started a whole new genre with the advent of the Western (which fans of the Western will recognize as a form that dominated American culture for generations). So his work has historical and social significance; hence, becomes "literature." A designation of "literature" almost immediately classifies a work as "high art," even if it may not qualify on its own merit.

Then I think about people like Chaucer who wrote for the masses, and, for all he knew, was producing "low brow" or "middle brow" art, yet ended up with a universal message by capturing the subtlety, irony, and ambiguity of life, across generations and across cultures. I'm not so sure that some of the composers mentioned earlier were intentionally producing "high art." It was recognized as such over time because of the timelessness of the message, and the composers themselves became archetypal image of the form, creating a new genre.

I know this is a terrible oversimplification, but I've heard that one of the main ingredients of "high art" is introspection. I agree that there is a transcendent quality to some forms of art which will transport the audience into another way of viewing the world. To me, that's art. It goes beyond evoking emotion to evoking change. Months ago (at BW's urging) I wrote a post about the new ballet, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. While I found the ballet entertaining, I didn't feel it had the transcendent quality that was in the original work. The story it was based on was far more haunting and ambiguous than the ballet. I'm not sure what that says about "high" and "low" art, but I think that "high art" acts as a catalyst for change (for good or evil) that "low art" can only mimic. And, sometimes, it is only in hindsight that we know which art is which.

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I hope we're not at the tail end of the discussion - your post shows there's plenty more to say. Thanks for reviving the topic.

Your post inspires me to ask this question, which I've pondered before. Is the status of the art determined by the artist and his/her process or the viewer's? I think good arguments can be made for both, and I'd make a strong case for the viewer when history and time are involved. If the art is removed from its native cultural milieu (ie someone in NYC today is reading a poem of a 13th century Provencal troubador) how the viewer treats and parses the poem could render it high art, even if it was sung in a tavern originally. Alexandra, I keep taking the relativist's side, care to weigh in with a more absolute argument?

On the specific issue of Chaucer, even though there was low comedy in The Canterbury Tales, if he was committing the tales to print, didn't that pretty much make it de facto high art in a time when most people couldn't read? I know I'm contradicting what I just said here, but I'm curious about the audience he was writing for. Any medievalists out there?

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I'm certainly no medievalist, but if Chaucer wanted fame and fortune, he probably knew he'd have to put pen to paper...plus how else could he remember it! Even the Bible finally made it to print, right?

In regard to your comments obbligato, where you say you might be "oversimplifying"... I think that simplicity can often be a virtue. ;) That being said, I tend to hold with your views when you said

"I agree that there is a transcendent quality to some forms of art which will transport the audience into another way of viewing the world. To me, that's art. It goes beyond evoking emotion to evoking change."

As I didn't see The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, I can't comment on it from a personal point of view...nevertheless, I do believe that a work of art, and art meaning "Art" as in the ultimate kind, has to transcend the five senses. Does that sound too vague? You wrote that

"high art" acts as a catalyst for change (for good or evil) that "low art" can only mimic."
Although I wonder if it is necessarily a catalyst for "good or evil", I do think it does function in part as a catalyst to thought, and emotion.

Earlier, Leigh, I believe you wrote that you believed education was necessary to truly understanding "high art"... At first, I nodded in agreement... but then, I changed my mind. Education can give one the words to explain the meaning or the method but I do not believe it is mandatory to experience "high art." To me the experience of art is based more upon the "eye" or the "soul" or whatever you'd like to call that inner quality of spirit or? that every human has, unless they've become so inured to life that they cannot feel or think.

I know that I'm opening myself up to comments that might say that to appreciate "high art" doesn't always require "feeling" but I disagree. By using the word "feeling", I don't necessarily mean emotion. Perhaps, again, it's a matter of knowing the right words to use?

obbligato your last statement "And, sometimes, it's only in hingsight that we know which art is which" seems to be historically often the case!

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Hmm. I don't think "education" is a prerequisite to getting High Art. I do think an educated eye is.

But to further your point BW, I agree with you that there's a visceral quality to art that is what endears it to us, but is the "Good China" worth anything more if our response to it and how we use it is the same as everyday stoneware? There are certain restaurants where I want the china to be special, I want to dress up to go there - I want to have more elaborate food than I would normally eat and I want that night to be different from all other nights ;) Everyday we listen to songs on the radio, and we enjoy them. They are important to us, as important as high art, and I'd argue that one reason is that pop songs, and other items of "everyday art" fix our lives on a timeline. As a snippet of a song played in one of Neil Greenberg's dances, he projected on the back screen "This was the song that was big the summer I was dating the married man." That's what I mean.

I'd argue that High Art ought to provoke a larger response than the visceral in us, and that response is not just emotion, but association, and even analysis. And this is much harder if you don't have the cultural background to parse the art. Yes, King Lear packs a wallop all on its own, but so does In Cold Blood. That's why we learn about iambic pentameter, why we study the surrounding Elizabethan culture, why we read the footnotes. It doesn't mean that Lear is lost to the person who simply goes to watch the play. But even in that case, I'd argue that experience is better if you come to the theater culturally literate than if you don't. I'm not talking about reading the standard list of "Dead White European Males". But I am talking about the kind of schooling (or native perception) that makes one an educated audience member; being able to pick up a book and see more than the plot, being able to listen to music and pick out a repeating theme or a leitmotif.

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"High art requires specialized knowledge not only to do it, but even to appreciate it"

Leigh Witchel

"Classical ballet is, at the end of the day, something for the connoisseur, for people who know something about the form. Some would have it be a popular art form. Well, it IS a universal language, but IT IS NOT A POPULAR ART FORM. The public, I think, has got to be educated."

Elisabeth Maurin, POB

Are they perhaps related ? We should be told.

(Private Eye).

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I'd like to know what Maurin defines as connoisseur.

I think there are certainly ballets that are "popular art", I think ballets like "Stars & Stripes" "Western Symphony" and "Nutcracker" qualify. Perhaps popular art in this case just means that anyone off the street would "get it"

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Well, for "Stars and stripes" it depends on the country, because I suspect that in France it would probably be welcome with laughs (not specifically because it's about the American flag, a ballet about the French flag would probably cause even more laughter, here people aren't especially keen on flags), and most people would just pay attention to that and not notice its balletic qualities...

Probably it depends also on what you mean by "get it"- for example, would a version of "Western symphony" which would be much inferior choreographically have the same success, just because of the costumes, the music, the easily recognizable themes?

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This is a fascinating discussion.

Just a few thoughts on "high art" and education:

Leigh wrote:

" I don't think "education" is a prerequisite to getting

High Art. I do think an educated eye is."

I wonder if the "educated eye" is in any way similar to the way we humans tend to learn language.

When we are very very young, before we speak, we hear and listen.

The first sounds we make encompass all the vocal sounds possible for humans.

The only ones we actually keep and learn to use are the ones we hear "echoed" back to us by our surroundings; our "mother tongue".

If we are surrounded by many different sounds and languages at a young age, it is perhaps easier for us to learn other languages later; we have already been "innoculated" with the sounds.

So, I wonder if this "educated eye" - or ear - could also work somewhat in the same way when it comes to art.

What we see and hear (and taste, smell, touch) all the time is -usually- what we feel is good and right.

If we are surrounded from an early age by many different types of, say, music (not just what is on the local station) then could we possibly be more likely to "enjoy" and "appreciate", and even want to learn more about these other types of music later on?

And could the same thing be true of painting/sculpture/etc.?

-diane-

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Estelle, do you think that a well-disposed French audience might enjoy "Stars & Stripes" on a sort of Offenbachian level? After all, it's there, a parallel between Sousa and Offenbach, and the former played in the latter's orchestra when Offenbach toured the US. I think that it affected the whole way that he put melodies together, and that Sousa is a composer very much in the French comic opera tradition.

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I don't know if early exposure makes a difference. It could make the wrong impression.

It's like reading a book in high school, and then reading it again later in life, when life experiences make it more pertinent.

I know a lot of people that didn't go to the ballet when they were younger, I think there's another thread still up on a British male writer, who's a perfect example.

And would someone who's exposed to ballet now have a different "educational" background as opposed to someone who say it in the 50's or 60's?

Obviously the length of time will be different, but will the evolution of the art make a difference?

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Leigh, I really do understand and agree with the points you make, especially, in your last paragraph. I appreciate your comparison to English literature and poetry, for that I do have some background in...as opposed to the fact that I have never studied ballet or choreography - only watched it.

Diane andCalliope, I think you are both right! Early exposure can be either a key, or a dead bolt to the appreciation of the "high arts" - whichever forms taken.

Here is my question, an offshoot if you will: do you all believe that someone who is not educated in the specific "high art" - such as ballet - is able to appreciate this art, in a way that meets the standards deserved by its "highness"?

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An emphatic yes from me.

I'm glad you keep asking these questions BW, because it makes me ask, "What do I expect from a member of the 'educated audience'?" (Reiterating that I mean someone who watches educatedly, not someone with a degree. . .)

I keep using the verb "to parse" when I describe the watching process I'm hoping for from an audience member. I remember when a good friend with no dance background (he was at that time a history professor) came with me to the ballet. He asked all the right questions. What I got from him was the sense of an eye that could look at both the whole of the work and the parts. He asked about equivalent aesthetics in forms of art he knew to draw parallels. He was trying to get under the skin of the work. This can be taken to an extreme: another friend, a lawyer, came with me for the first time and was walloped by Concerto Barocco (not a bad sign!) but interestingly, faltered on other works. We talked about this once, he warms to the works with theses (for those who know law, he writes appellate briefs, so this makes sense!) but the works that simply portray an emotional state leave him befuddled. I described them to him as "emotional landscapes" and his response was "It figures. Pictorial landscapes leave me cold, too." It may not have been the response I wanted, but I wouldn't call his eye uneducated, just narrow in its preferences!

So here's my question. That's what makes an "educated" eye for me. Is that universally accepted, or are those just my personal standards? Would someone like to talk about a more visceral response as being a mark of the ideal audience member?

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Yes, I agree, having early exposure can backfire. ;-)

I did not necessarily mean that one would have to have been exposed to every type of "art" in order to better appreciate, understand, enjoy it later in life.

However, I was wondering if perhaps early exposure to some arts; say classical music and painting, could perhaps make one more receptive to these and to other arts - ballet and literature, for example - later on.

My hypothesis is that it could.

In many of the little kids I teach, there has been no exposure to anything, as far as music goes, but what is heard on the local radio stations.

Hardly any of them have ever been to a museum, nor do they have art books at home, etc.

Not one has ever seen a ballet. (Some have seen "Barbie in the Nutcracker" on t.v. Almost all have seen figure-skating.)

The very fact that these kids come to "ballet" class ("movement to music") is a positive sign, I hope.

re the "educated eye":

Interesting observations, Leigh.

I think that many things qualify as "educated" for me.

First of all I would say: thinking.

That to me is really important. Not just "consuming", but

thinking.

Wanting to find out more. Following up on things.

Finding subtle differences in various performances - on many levels.

How one arrives at this could have many variations, of course.

What would they be?

I shall have to think about this some more before I comment further.

:)

-diane-

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i had an interesting experience recently when i was visiting the house of a friend who was a dancer and who has a 17-year-old daughter. Her daughter's young (also 17) male friend came by just as my friend and i sat down to watch a video of act 2 of bayadere. we didn't realize that he had also started to watch, and at the end of the entrance of the shades, he shook his head and said, 'wow i was hypnotized!". he hadn't ever been to a ballet, and my friend said she'd only ever heard him talk about sports and cars. i suppose that could be a visceral response and is a hopeful sign, but of course if they never see it at all they'll never have those reactions!

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Amuhrikens are typically against state subsidized art, simply because mainstream (Ballet, Opera, Symphonies) get some funding, but more funding goes to "alternative" artisits who inject politics into many of their peices. I don't mind giving some money to fund offbeat art, but please don't insult me or my intelligence.

I recall a peice of "performance art" that was a woman on stage and basically screamed all night about perceived enemies, total nonsense. Yet it was funded by NEA and the NYS fund for the arts.

Good art will move me, great art will make me cry, but bad art just confuses me.

MJY

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