Holding Tight To High Culture

Is Lincoln Center too devoted to high culture? Deborah Solomon thinks so, and argues that, in the wake of the New York Philharmonic’s planned departure a few years down the road, Lincoln Center would do well to start embracing a bit of moneymaking pop culture. “What is art? Philosophers have debated the question for centuries, but at Lincoln Center the answer is clear. Art is anything that loses money… The greatest threat to the institution comes not from within, but from without, as it struggles to sustain a 20th-century, Rockefeller-style conception of high culture in the populist, mass-everything 21st century.”