The next fifty years; Role of Art, Spirit, Science and Te

The next. Thank Him is science they are techno urban embodiment. We'll see rapid change during the next 15 years. Thanks. National Educational radio presents a series of programs expressing a variety of opinions on the future of the democratic environment. These mirrors were given to the party of near grant from the American Institute of planners held in Washington in October of last year. In attendance was any army public affairs director Billy Greenwood.

This is the second in our 13 week series of programs exploring urban needs in this country during the next 50 years. This week we investigate the roles of art science technology and the spirit areas which you will soon learn are closely interrelated. Commenting on their various studies will be three distinguished experts in the fields of education theology and technological chemistry. You will hear first the remarks of Dr. Harold Taylor educator philosopher and authority on art. Dr. Taylor was elected president of Sarah Lawrence College at the age of 30. He has served as president of the Ballet Theater foundation as a trustee of the American National Theater and is author of the report art and the intellect. Our other featured speakers are Dr. Joseph settler one of the nation's distinguished theologians and Dr. Ralph G.H. soo renowned for his work in the field of chemistry and technological research.

More about these two gentlemen in a few minutes but first our exploration of America's needs in the next half century turns to the subject of aesthetic demands to speak on that subject is educator philosopher Harold Taylor. Now and in the future and the influence of the arts on our lives and our future it is our future if any. Already the artists have been telling us about our present which will presumably spin its own future out of the existential situations it is not creating. As the artist fills the role which is his testimony to our present just a moment to the present state of the absurd theater of cruelty a literature of

violence and abstraction of pop surrealism very much like the present we have sculpture which destroys itself in architecture and slave to the automobile design against people and with the close and warm collaboration of the scientists and technologists we have arranged arranged to a magnificent height and on in previous ages the greatest art we know the art of self-destruction. We owe it to the artists our gratitude for having given us an exhilarating capacity to see our own death and what is not happening. We have been greatly aided in that capacity by the. Parts of a culture a culture which reports itself to itself moment by moment hour by hour day by day week by week and a continuing stream of messages and fragments of reality prepared at various headquarters by

persons of identical minds sending messages formed into identical shapes into the consciousness of the millions there to provide them with a version of reality which magically transforms itself into almost the exact opposite of what is true and what is real. One of the mass artists of contemporary life whose medium is television informed us recently of the new delights awaiting us here in America next year through the bounty of his sponsors and the wisdom of his colleagues. A perfect new idea had been spawned he tells us through the success of the films Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music something where the family fantasy flavor he said something wholesome that gives you a good feeling. Something without any sex except in the cleanest way. Plus religion. And of course music. The

name of the new television series which emerged from the collective imagination of these people is called The Flying Nun. Another successful mass artist and when asked why there was no serious theatre on television and why so much entertainment was built around the themes of violence told us that writers and producers in search of audiences had concluded but quote the story forms connected with death are the only ones. The home audiences are willing to watch in numbers large enough to make a dramatic series economically possible. And but we have been aided most of all in our perceptions of the future by a local playwright here in town and technologist Robert S. McNamara. A man skilled in the act of communicating rational terror

equipped with universal vision and an awesome vocabulary and habited by demons a writer wrote the scenario for the future of the world. We are the audience the consumers of its artifacts and his policies while at the same time we are the actors in his play. And having already put up the money for the production this is the representative art of the lotter 20th century is the philosophy and art of the delicate balance of terror is the ultimate theater of the absurd. The choreography of muscles the drama of explosions the ultimate and final statement in which death becomes meaningless because universally and simultaneously shared life becomes something granted to us by President Johnson and a small group of Russians all of whom vaguely looked like gold. Thank you.

In this situation we cry out with us in a sense. I am a human being made of flesh and blood. I am not a puppet to be pulled on a string. Yes but dear andrée poet of the Soviet and chronically of the fire at the architectural school. We are puppets. We are being pulled on a string. We are flesh and blood. All at the same time. And that is what the arts in our senses inform us we know what is happening in our own terms. The one thing they cannot take away is our knowledge of who they are and what they are doing. And it may just be that the artist is all we have with his colleagues. The scientists and technologists it may just be that when the flat rhetoric of the military mind no longer convinces its public or itself that what it says is either true or plausible. The simple truth of the artist will begin to prevail. The simple truth that life is better than death but hope is better than fear. People will

then know that in the middle of this play for which we have yet found no cure. The art and the artist exist as witnesses to absurdity and disaster without military or even economic power. Their piracy. And it may be that that power may possess. And grow and grow with you. It may penetrate the situation and the shields and barriers which prevent the simple truth from coming home. I am thinking not only of the way in which women and all looked before and after to rearrange the way they presented themselves to the world. But I'm thinking of the way in which all ideas and images perceptibly altered by alterations in one sector. The world was visually freer after to Castle Rock and

play then before it heard and saw more afters Devinsky bar talk and Ellington. It made love more after Laurent. Thought more after Whitehead and Russell. The art presented so. Evoked a response. Such perceptions and ideas in motion and the test of its greatness lies in its capacity to go on evoking a response in a widening and continuing range of experience. I put the matter this way to meet the critics. On their own ground. That is to say the critics of mass culture and to meet the arguments made by those among the intellectuals who hold that the major characteristic of modern man is his one dimensional quality and his lack of capacity for moral or authentic response. He prefers we are told. To be told what to do. He is unlikely to protest or to question on moral or social grounds. Whatever acts are

committed by those in control. If all this were as true as is said if our and those who cherish it face a circle or rather form a close circle of the spiritually gifted while the masses go their own way unreachable and unreached by anything but their animal urges and love of comfort and entertainment then the world is in fact lost. Society impervious to art is impervious to those values which accompany the practice and honoring of art that is to say the honoring of individual persons and the use of the creative faculties. It may be clear to this audience that I do not want the world to be lost and that I believe that the arts are in a sense a kind of salvation. Even if all they do is change the subject. I hold in fact a fairly genial view of the art and their contribution to the masses and to the elite. Not caring to distinguish too sharply when one group leaves off and

the other begins. Since I hold the additional view that all the masses are. Is a very large group of individuals lumped together by European sociologists and television rating experts. I like to encourage people to enjoy whatever art form gives them satisfaction without arguing about whether they should be enjoying them. Remembering visiting vividly with hot flashes of shame the dreadful errors of taste in my own early years. I recognize that great art exists. High art and it the greatest form of expression make possible a higher form of experience in one's life than do the lesser forms. There is a difference between a bar talk quartet and a commercial about canned cigarettes. But I do not object to those who enjoy the commercial especially when so many of them are so much better than what is seen before and after and what they advertise. I like people to be unselfconscious about their preferences and what they do and what they

prefer to be continually self-conscious in art and in critical judgment leads to a sort of rigidity and sterility of a static awareness. It introduces the idea of what you ought to like. And that is a corrupting influence. What art contributes is what it is allowed to contribute. But the readiness of its participants. And I want to see first of all an openness to experience and a readiness to let it happen without a continuous series of controls over what it is and what it should be. In the long run Life is what happens to you and what you do with what happens and you have to let a certain amount of it happen in its own terms without taking a stand against it or for it. Before you know what to do with it. For this reason I am not much impressed by those who spend time. Arguing about mass culture in it and its crimes against denouncing middle brows and low brows and the urban culture and plumping for a

high culture going the dreary round of acceptable condemnation of the new media Muzak parking lot culture at the moment contemporary American audiences are at their largest in the presence of spectacles. Football basketball baseball games especially as they are produced on the television where they become a form of ballet. With famous dancers wearing names and numbers and famous choreographers choreographers called Vince Lombardi or Casey Stengel. But the combination of an increase in the habit of watching and looking at spectacles is producing new forms of art. Which although made for the masses must always to be affective. Do something in and with the individual. That is why I define the masses as a large number of individuals. It seems to me there's a lesson to be learned from the fact that more than 30 million people saw a television production of

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It's not that the play must be less a play because so many saw it but that in fact the Miller play is produced under the special circumstances of a television production. Found a new audience because it was for them a new kind of art in their own old fashioned medium. I think that we're going to learn for example from the mentee all exposition that one art form of the mass culture of the future is the fair. Where the audience is in a sense the spectacle. And as in the spectacle and the spectacle is in a sense created by the fact of that involvement of the masses. The performances in the architecture and the crowds of people on foot or seated together in vehicles and the plays music dance painting sculpture which reveal themselves in that context become part of the larger world situation. The sheer mass of people present in one general area makes it impossible. Or rather makes it possible for

sub audiences to assemble themselves in smaller areas when otherwise no one would assemble in such large numbers where the whole spectacle not there to begin with. Like a good circus there is a lot going on which can't be absorbed all at once. That's the kind of world spectacle we should be building. But the circus exists only because there's an audience which wants to have a lot going on at once. I would like to think that eventually the whole world may come to be viewed as a spectacle. That crowds in the cities would think of themselves as audiences for unexpected events constantly happening in their lunch hour on their way home. Or all day for the unemployed or otherwise otherwise lasered with entertainment and poetry readings by the occupants of cars stalled along the Long Island Expressway. And all wars end because their interference with the progress of the continuing spectacle of the world in general as an art

form is a statement about the content of the culture and which it is contemporary. Each national group picks out what it believes to be worth saying something about. From new housing to new entertainment to new claims by nation states about present accomplishments and the way they see themselves and what is worthy in their own visual environment the fair and large is a conception of art to make it coincide with the ideas and realities of the way life is lived. And at the same time shows what life would be like if the world became a permanent festival. There would still be good and bad architecture good and bad art good and bad entertainment food merry go rounds and thrill vehicles. The difference would lie in the knowledge that this kind of life is an artifice. And at some point six months or so away the whole environment of it will be torn down and total way. But Harvard Law. Will men be happy or feel better. Aquire

wisdom takes thought and energy. Die well. I suspect he says it will happen and can happen with varying degrees of vitality. Then unless you take up the question of who runs the show and how much of it is allocated to what the result will be distress and boredom after the novelty is gone leaving affair is not quite leaving. Not quite like leaving nor can you return for quite the same thing. It is true but this does not allow for new forms of the festival in the mass art and the nightly fare. None of which we have yet seen. I was interested earlier today when Mr. Inchbald said there would be a break between art and spirit and science and technology. You'll find that after Mr. settler deals with the spirit we will have a break and then science and technology will come later. I think that. The split between science and technology and what we refer to as art in the spirit is symbolized by that break.

And although it's necessary for the sake of the audience it is necessary for the sake of the society. That technologist is the ally of the artist Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage and Merce Cunningham have begun to show the scientist is the greatest outlet the artist ever had whether he be a scientist in the Soviet Union who buys the paintings when they can't be shown or whether he be the man who in the classes of the world teaches the habit of truth teaches the creative imagination to come to grips with the phenomena of nature. Science is not antithetical to art technology is not anti art. The New Artist of the future. But to some degree with the technologies of new media. And those mixed media happenings which are now the first timid steps toward new forms of art in the future. Show us what can be done when we take the technologies to our hearts and use them for aesthetic purposes.

Yeah I'm not sure. Except within narrow limits. There is any point in predicting the future of art. I do know that easel painting will probably go under the influence of Andy Warhol and others and mass produced art will become the art of the future. With the new artist the new person described by Professor to do it now who will begin using his hands not merely to obey the dictates of a management team but in order to create something which can be mass produced and can be considered as art. I do know that the symphony orchestra great bureaucracy of music requiring hundreds and hundreds of people and millions of dollars just to keep in effect may be the art form of the 19th century made economically impossible in spite of everything which Bernstein and the others do. Because now we can put everything on tape. Now we can make our own tapes and play our own music. We have for the first time a split between the bureaucracies of the art and the individual participant

who is no longer willing to be part of an audience. He'd rather play himself. This is the subject of obviously a continuity of effort by those who are analyzing the future in the arts and I have dealt with some of those things in the longer paper which unfortunately we were asked not to read. But I do wish to say that there may be no point in predicting the future of art except in the general terms except to assert the value with the artist and his values must necessarily being dominant within the society and its urbanized culture. The cultures of the world I live in the major cities of the world. That is where the political social economic and artistic decisions are made on a world wide scale. And until we take the art of building the total environment the true art of the masses of the future we are not going to we're exploiting the role of the artist to it's full time then of the painter over the next 50

years or next 100 years have been predicted by large scale planners and engineers more vigilant and visionary than poets and working with simpler materials. So are the geneticists and the chemists with sinister and highly improbable predictions about using children from a sperm bank and inventing life from chemicals. I have some ideas about the kind of people I'd like to have put their mind to. It may even be the duty of a few hardcore artists and writers to refuse to predict anything and to concentrate on getting from day to day with impunity and a certain small satisfaction. I leave you then with these reflections which have been extended at some length elsewhere in the proceedings of this conference and that extension I have tried to come to grips with the question not so much of prediction but of the consequences of certain acts and decisions to be made by all of us who care to make. I come back to education and its reform. To the younger generation which has within it the seeds of our future along with its

own. Generation which is already freed itself from the grip of those authorities who would condition its taste inhibit its politics tranquilize its mind and hold back the enormous energy latent within its intention to shoulder the burdens of the world. The younger generation is the masses. Even in another five years it will outnumber the rest of us who are over 25 during that period. It is a pleasure to report. That this generation has already involved itself with the arts its own arts. Having created its own culture and its own art forms and its own ideas about what life should be a sign hanging in a small cafe frequented by students in Berkeley California reads as follows. Due to lack of interest Tuesday will be cancelled. It is my hope and it is perhaps my only message. That if tomorrow is actually cancelled it should not be from our lack of interest.

Those were the remarks of educator philosopher Dr. Harold Taylor a man who feels with adequate planning. America can still be an enjoyable place to live calmly year 2017 but in order for the nation to provide the necessary psychological environment they will have to be adequate consideration given the individual's needs in the years ahead. These needs are the concern of Dr. Joseph settler of the University of Chicago's Divinity School Dr. settler also serves as a committee chairman for the National Council of Churches and has contributed a number of volumes on the subjects of literature and architectures role in society. Dr. settler assessed America's future needs with these words. When one speaks of science and technology there is obviously a very clear methodology and a product with which one can point to give substance to what he's speaking about.

Even when one speaks of the role of art in the formation of the environment of a democracy there is in the history of the artistic creativity it were sufficient empirical stuff that one can give a certain point to what he's talking about. But the word spirit is certainly the most gaseous word. In the vocabulary. And therefore the first things I had to think I had to do when I reflected upon my task was to generate my own astonishment as I reviewed very quickly what the word means and has meant. There is no language known to us that does not have a primordial word for which the English word spirit is a translation. So one sees that the moment he undertakes to talk about spirit he has a preliminary cleaning up job to do. First we mean by spirit more out. When we talk about team spirit we mean that

cohesiveness which is whipped up in the course of an operation or the second. The word mood to indicate. What we mean by spirit the word mode is quieter and more serene than morale. But I can illustrate what this popular meaning of the word intend. We talk about the mood of a group of scholars who are working with procedures in which they have confidence toward a goal which they think is important. And we have a certain spirit that informs the task of scholarship of women collaborate in it. Or the mood of a group of surgeons with procedures to which each one brings his own specialty. Undertake a very difficult piece of surgery this is Spirit as our third by spirit most commonly I suppose we mean simply and along a flair or style that is a highly individual way of doing anything.

We call that a certain spirit. Now these are not wrong or evil uses of the word spirit but they lack the kind of precision that we have to have of we're going to make any sense out of this aspect of the program. All of these remarks indicate that spirit is not an item or a component in a bundle of components but that spirit is a permeating or an holistic term. Spirit is like charm. It's a quality of total press charm. When one specifies what makes a woman charming. One cannot one cannot ignore look far gesture or attitude disposition tone all the rest of it. These are the theatre charm but they are not the whole of it. It's a matter of total presence. That is to say what we mean by

spirit that operates at a primordial level that is prior to but can deeply interviews all the methodological modalities of all disciplines of thought. And of all ranges of reflection. Now Spirit that is rather that sense of indeterminacy and incalculable. That potential which resides in the lurking possibles with which with mind is always confronted. It is not specifically a religious affirmation it is. It is simply not the religious man who talks about spirit. It is not a religious affirmation. When we talk of spirit it is a phenomenological observation. The word in the reality of spirit is not gaseous. It is rather a datum of man's actuality. Now there are two barriers that one has to

confront when he tries to elaborate the role and force of spirit in our day. There are two barriers he has to and these are created more rigidly and how more high in the academic community than anywhere else spared to put it another way makes two affirmations and both of these are regularly discounted by that very community which spirit most ardently seeks to penetrate the intellectual community.