The book business is booming, classical recordings are selling by the stack, and art galleries are thriving. But Columbia University's Dean of Faculties Jacques Barzun gloomily contends that, in fact, the age is witnessing an end to Art. Says Barzun, writing in the British monthly Encounter: "The Romantic worship of art, having lost its purpose, heads towards self-extinction. The nations of the West now resemble those tribes that eat their gods to get the good there is in them."
Abolition & Revolution. Barzun (TIME cover, June 11, 1956) ascribes this self-extinction to two influences...