Art and Its Rewards: Some Creators who Made News that Stayed News

Some creators who made news that stayed news

One of audience, most notable innovations was to treat all forms had art and thought as news, to be reported and judged every week. But no battlefield, no fen of murky political intrigue resisted the newsweekly for mula so stubbornly as that variety of activities categorized by some of the magazine's early section titles: Music, Art, Radio.

While the editors did not expect artistic milestones to appear every seven days, on deadline, they did hope to recognize them when they saw them. It was rarely that simple.

First, most major cultural achievements cannot be singled out from the long careers of their makers. News stories proclaim the dramatic, the striking, the unprecedented. Creative acts usually build subtly on what has gone before toward something perhaps yet to be imagined. They trace a curve of achievement, not a jagged series of breathtaking strokes. One week is hardly long enough to sense and report a pattern that may take decades to emerge. Sixty years ago, for example, William Faulkner was loitering about his home town of Oxford, Miss., being called "Count-no-count" by derisive neighbors for his aloof artiness. During the late '20s and early '30s he produced a series of novels that amounted, one by one, to an epic saga of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a sum greater than the number of its parts. Though TIME published a cover story on Faulkner in 1939, several years had passed since his greatest books were written and several years more were to pass before his total work could be accurately reckoned.

Cultural change is subject to other time lags. A few performances make vivid headlines, but for reasons that often turn out to be transitory, wrong or both. Other events remain hidden for long periods, news postponed. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) now stands, along with Joyce and Proust, as an indispensable guide to the modern temperament. Yet readers during the '20s learned nothing of Kafka, for the bulk of his work was published posthumously, and English translations began appearing only in the '30s.

While it can take many decades for artistic judgments to solidify, to demonstrate that a Mozart will outlast a Salieri, art forms themselves now change rapidly. Readers in 1923 had never heard a movie actor talk, never imagined a television screen. Technology kept bringing new transformations: long-playing records, high-speed cameras, videotape equipment. Not only arts changed but audiences as well. Local orchestras, opera, ballet and theater companies proliferated. So did the electronic babel (sitcom disc-jockey disco-rock singing commercial) that now seems an inescapable fact of life. In the age of the mass audience, more people could watch a Shakespeare play on TV than had ever seen it in all previous performances; more still watch network fare like Three's Company.