Volume 28, Number 6 · April 16, 1981
The Second Life of Art
By Eugenio Montale
The so-called divorce between contemporary art and the public is not a recent development. Even fifty or a hundred years ago—and one could go back much further—there was an art for the few, for initiates. Leopardi and Baudelaire failed to win enthusiastic recognition in their lifetimes, and Manet had to slap one of his denigrators to turn him into his devoted servant and patron. Nevertheless, the initiated public in the last century was still a public, not a crowd of failed artists. Those who approached Parsifal and the Ring Cycle at the end of the nineteenth century studying ponderous 'thematic guides' and following the leitmotivs with their fingers were lawyers, doctors, businessmen, not always failed musicians or poets.
Feature, 1687 words
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