quick someone find me that video of fran lebowitz talking about the affect the aids epidemic had on cultural literacy
“No one talks about the effect that AIDS had on the culture, in the sense — I mean, people don’t talk about it anymore, but when people did talk about it, they talked about, like, what artists were lost, but they never talked about this audience that was lost. You know, when people talk about, like, ‘Why was the New York City Ballet so great?’ Well, it was because of Balanchine and Jerry Robbins and people like that, but also that audience was so — I can’t even think of the word. I mean, Suzanne Farrell went like this instead of this—” she models slight hand movements— “that was it! She might as well just kill herself. There would be, like, a billion people who knew exactly every single thing. You know, there was such a high level of connoisseurship of everything that people like this were interested in — you know, of everything that made the culture better. You know, a very discerning audience, an audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as artists. It’s exactly as important. Now, we don’t have any kind of discerning audience. When that audience died — and that audience died in five minutes. Literally, people didn’t die faster in war, and it allowed, of course, the second, third, fourth tier to rise to the front. Because the first people who died of AIDS were the people who — I don’t know how to put this — got laid a lot. Okay, now imagine who didn’t get AIDS, okay? That’s who was then lauded as, like, the great, you know, artists, okay? You know, if the other people […] all came back to life, and I would say to them, ‘Guess who’s a big star? Guess who has a show on Broadway? Guess who’s, like, a famous photographer?’ They would, like, fall on the floor! Are you kidding me? Because everyone else died. Last man standing, okay? I mean, that loss of that audience had a terrible effect, and a terrible effect on me, by which I mean not just a sad, personal effect on me, but a terrible effect on me because everything has to be broader. I mean, I don’t do that, you know, but everyone else did, you know? Everything has to be more blatant, more on the nose, broader, you know, because obviously they’re not gonna pick up little subtleties. Things in the culture that had nothing to do with the New York City Ballet, you know, it just got dumbed down, dumbed down, dumbed down, all the way down.”
- Fran Lebowitz, Public Speaking (2010)
see this is why it really bugs me when people say judging art by any metric at all is “fascism”. your anti-connoisseurship takes are LIGHTYEARS more fascist than somebody’s negative opinion of your favorite show
