Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous hole that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell wh...at negro slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, as they are producers of corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of sugar, of rum and brandy; gentle and joyous themselves, and producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world,--there seated in the finest climates of the globe, children of the sun,--I am heart-sick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Folk art" signifies the poetical, musical, and pictorial activities of those strata of the population which are uneducated and no...t urbanized or industrialized. It is of the essence of this art that those who keep it in being are not only passively receptive, but normally are creative participants in the artistic activities, and yet do not stand out as individuals or claim any personal authorship of the productions. "Popular art" on the other hand is to be understood as artistic or quasi-artistic production for the demand of a half-educated public, generally urban and inclined to mass-behavior. In folk art, producers and consumers are hardly distinguished, and the boundary between them is always fluid; in the case of popular art, we find on the contrary an artistically uncreative, completely passive public, and professional production of artistic goods strictly in response to the demand for them. It is indeed a striking fact that folk art, especially folk-poetry, emerges from the ranks of those who enjoy it, whereas popular songs--the street ballads and popular "hits"Mderive from professionals belonging to and spir itually dependent upon the upper classes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today's parents have little authority over those others with whom they share the task of raising their children. On the contrary, ...most parents deal with those others from a position of inferiority or helplessness. Teacher, doctors, social workers, or television producers possess more status than most parents.... As a result, the parent today is ... a maestro trying to conduct an orchestra of players who have never met and who play from a multitude of different scores, each in a notation the conductor cannot read.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they sa...y it in curves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a play of the nineteen-twenties, called L'Abime (The Abyss), by the well known French author Suire. It has already passed... form the stage straight into the Lesser Lethe (the one, that is, that serves the theater--a stream, incidentally, not quite as hopeless as the main river, and containing a weaker solution of oblivion, so that angling producers may still fish something out many years later).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All industries are brought under the control of such people [film producers] by Capitalism. If the capitalists let themselves be s...educed from their pursuit of profits to the enchantments of art, they would be bankrupt before they knew where they were. You cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People on the East Coast regard people west of, say, Philadelphia as either slightly cute or slightly repugnant, alien life forms.... Any show that comes from out of town to New York invariably gets a review which says in effect, "They might like this stuff in Hicksville, but this is the Apple, Kids. This is the eye of God." Californians don't have that kind of arrogance, luckily, because they can't pay attention long enough to finish anything. That's why so many Californians are consultants or producers, and so many people in the East are writers or directors. Never mind that most writers on the best-seller lists couldn't put a well-formed sentence together if you gave them the glue, or that the so-called "serious" writers only write about writers writing stories about writers writing stories, the two coasts are still the cultural power centers of America: books, theater, and art in the East; movies, music, and TV in the West.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the ...roll-'em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machin...e, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »