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The situation is similar in the arts. If tradition means restraint, there is scarcely any restraint about what may be publicly expressed or represented. U.S. audiences seem to have become unshockable. Dramas of incest and homosexuality are commonplace, total (if momentary) nudity has occurred onstage in Marat/Sade and in a "happening" at Manhattan's Judson Memorial Church playhouse, in which a nude couple was seen slowly crossing the stage clasped in each other's arms. As for literature, even though the Supreme Court decision on Publisher Ralph Ginzburg and Eros suggests a reassertion of older standards (TIME, April 1), nearly every drugstore or bookshop is loaded with hard-core pornography, much of it solemnly reviewed by serious critics.
In other ways, art has gone beyond all limits. Americans have quickly run through abstract expressionism, action painting, pop, op, kinetic and minimal art. With gravely innocent eye, the public contemplates art consisting of a real chair or a coiled rope, of limp sculpted toilets, of nudes that go through movements of coition. Like the young, artists are traditionally supposed to break with tradition, but there is hardly any tradition to break with. Irish, Southern and Jewish writers have been among the most productive in the U.S.—probably because they still have a tradition to work in, or to flout, if they so choose. In what might be called situation esthetics, new styles are eagerly seized even before they are fully formed, and almost automatically accepted; as Critic Harold Rosenberg noted in The Tradition of the New: "An appetite for a new look is now a professional requirement, as in Russia to be accredited as a revolutionist is to qualify for privileges."
The Virtues of Vulgarity
Architecture has broken out of the glass-and-steel box that long held sway, and which itself represented a rebellion against older forms. A new skyscraper may be built in the shape of an obelisk, a new air terminal constructed on the principle of an Arab's silken tent, a new garage like a Pueblo chiefs dwelling. Among the most daring patrons of the new architecture are U.S. churches, Mrs. Porter Brown, general secretary of the Methodist Board of Missions, argued recently that cathedrals were symbolic of a static community, while today's churches should be "fellowship buildings created to serve persons on the move or in pilgrimage."
The new music is often made up of electronic squeals, tics, toes, street noises and shaped silences—in a recent recital at Manhattan's Y.M.C.A., three musicians solemnly performed a modern work composed of exhaling in unison, slapping thighs, rhythmic stamping and throwing things. New dances almost always alarm the conventional, but more than a conventional change seems to have occurred with the frug and its successors—including the alligator, in which a couple lies down on the floor and starts writhing rhythmically.