Via Megan McArdle, I see Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, issued the following challenge:

I'd ask [ordinary Americans] how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.

I'd even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.

Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

I'm guessing I did even worse than McArdle admits to doing. I agree with Gioia's point that mass American culture used to be a lot more intelligent; but the conditions of his challenge -- that those named be "living" and "American" -- are frankly rather absurd. Most (at any rate, many) Americans can still identify the figures of 50 years ago whom Gioia names.

The difference, it seems to me, is in the caliber of contemporary American fine art and poetry. (Scientific illiteracy is another matter.) Poetry, painting, and sculpture are, in some sense, exhausted art forms. That doesn't mean beauty or significance can't be achieved anymore in these media, but, rather like the language of religious liturgy, there ain't much new under the sun.

The action in our mass culture is where it intersects with technology; needless to say, it's a far different, and no less complex, world than that of 1957. I certainly don't celebrate the popularity of "American Idol" (I'm not all that bothered by it, either.) But neither am I sure that Americans would be better off spending their time with contemporary American poetry.