We live in a country of great wealth and technology whose avowed spiritual and political concerns share the heady idealism of an artistic manifesto.
Jazz remains unrecognized as a serious art form.
Modern dance and the tradition of Isadora Duncan, Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham have, until recently, been ignored. The crisis, with its particular form of chauvinism and naivete, is not new. Around the middle of the nineteenth century a great critical debate raged over various prescriptions for the new American Shakespeare. Those who did review the book were shocked at the blasphemous betrayal of literary convention and found the moral ambiguities it described, to say the least, inconvenient. Melville stated that he no longer existed.