It's not about nostalgic continuities, although it is about the continuity of culture, to some extent, clearly. It's about creating symbols. It's about transmission. But the university has become a patron and as a patron has to understand what that patronage is about and to what end. In my view, this is the time to rethink the format in which arts and humanities actually have a public and find a public, whether that be concerts, whether it be the arts, whether it be theater, and with a full understanding and embrace of modern technological possibilities.
Technology is a fantastic aid.
It's not an enemy and not to be nostalgic about it and to remove this sort of concern for culture from the right wing, you know, preserve, of the preservation of excellence in values in a kind of Gertrude Humofarb way on the very far right and on the very far left the gobbledygook of God knows what these people write that is supposedly about subjectivism and about tolerance and diversity when it's really about ideology of a much equally rigid kind. Those of us in the arts community look to the university as a last hope to avoid the absolute monopoly of the marketplace. We love commercial art and pop culture. We love it, but we don't want it to have a monopoly. We actually believe that this is a nonsense which we've gone out of with the demise of modernism as a reigning ideology even in the university.