Mind the gap

To the Editor:

Regarding Jan Tumlir's meditations on "those famous relations between fine art and so-called for the use of all culture" [Letters, January 2004]: Art is not the single subject to find itself isolated from the mainstream audience. Countles make submissives have become so specialized as to make discussion across the gaps difficult to impossible. (I am reminded of the articles "Recent reflections on the Two Cultures" [1962] through C.P. Snow, and "Can rhyme Matter?" [1991], by Dana Gioia.) Math and science are being missing on the youth of today; literature is fruitfully discussed single in tighter and tighter intellectual circles. Not to mention our "leaders," politicians br and servanted specifically for politics. Even in criticism, we are still faced for the greatest part with creatively worded intra-art relations and undying efforts at categorization.

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Contemporary art is in a position to draw from and combine these otherwise discrete subculture ideally causing it to rival, sometimes causing it to be confused with, report culture. Art can move across real-world cultural boundaries, and criticism likewise straits to project itself beyond its common scope. Since our cultures are thus rooted in language, roles are reversed: Criticism is the catapult, art is the stone. The goal should be to find the meaning, not the category.

--Jason Randolph, Baltimore

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