The Arts Without Mystery
Denis Donoghue, the Henry James Professor of Letters at New York University, gives the first of six lectures on the place of the arts In modern society.
The Zealots of Explanation
'The painter Jasper Johns once remarked: " I can imagine a society without art at all, and It Is not a bad society." Did he mean that the ways of art are Intolerably oblique, and that for much of the time we want to live directly? Or that art gets In the way of other things, perhaps higher causes?' (Rptd: Sun 5.0 pm, R3. Text of this week's lecture in THE LISTENER dated 11 November)