A short while ago, standing in the lobby of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, I was chatting with a friend, a professor of literature. We had both just seen two of W.C. Fields' films and he was so enthusiastic and admiring of Fields' talent that I ventured the remark that "Fields was a great artist". As if I had rung Pavlov's bell, my academic friend appeared puzzled for a moment and then responded with what he considered the correct adjectivial correction: "A great popular artist".

This response was not unique. Dining with friends several nights ago, I suggested that the Israeli Opera Company might broaden its repertoire to include some of the musicals of Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers. One person at the table nearly choked on her soup and another looked at me as if I was quite mad. "Don't you think," she asked "that an opera company has the responsibility to preserve the distinction between high and low cultural events?"

Many of my friends are missing the point. Even though people have become convinced of the contrary, there is no true distinction between what they perceive as highbrow and lowbrow art-forms. The fragmented state of the arts that exists today, in the Middle East as in Europe and North and South America, is not a natural one. Until the 1920s, whether in Europe or America, a wide variety of expressive art-forms, Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow, enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In addition to whatever specific ethnic, class and regional cultures they were part of, people shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid groupings than that which we are offered today.

By the onset of the Great Depression, however, cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space became more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a meeting ground for the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to vaudeville, had become fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same fragmentation occurred in concert halls, opera houses and museums. With this split came rigid cultural categories and many who considered themselves educated and cultured lost the ability to discriminate independently, to determine for themselves which cultural forms were important to their lives.

To discuss the increasing separation between art forms that exists today is to enter a world of crude labels such as `highbrow', `middlebrow' and `lowbrow'. It is to enter an arena of endless defensiveness and reflex-like responses. Not to enter the argument is to acknowledge the growing chasm between what so many people think of as `serious' and `popular' culture. It is also to passively legitimize the tragedy that millions are now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven and Verdi while others have only the most grudging contacts with the works of Madonna, Thelonious Monk and Nora Ephron.

The fact is, (and frankly, I don't care who chokes on their soup), that there has been altogether too much separation in the way we perceive different forms of similar arts. Jazz artists have been saying for many years that there is simply not that large a gap separating rock from classical music. Duke Elington observed that jazz "is only a word and has really has no meaning. To keep the whole thing clear, once and for all, I don't believe in categories of any kind". Dizzy Gillespie was willing to recognize only two categories of music "there's only good and bad".

There is no reason why an opera house cannot perform The Barber of Seville on Monday night, Showboat on Tuesday and Carmen on Wednesdays. There is no question that Guys and Dolls and Babes in Arms can be compared favorably with Norma and La Traviata. There is nothing outrageous about comparing Italian opera with American musicals.

Susan Sontag has often attempted to convince us that the distinction between high and low culture is meaningless. It is important, Sontag says, "to understand that the affection which many younger artists and intellectuals feel for the popular arts is not a new philistinism or a species of anti-intellectualism or some kind of abdication from culture". It merely reflects a new, more open way of looking at the world and at things in the world.

There are hopeful signs that this artificial split between art-forms may be drawing to a close. The Connecticut Stamford Center for the Arts recently advertised itself by picturing hands applauding Mel Torme, James Galway, Leontyne Price, Andres Segovia, Peter, Paul and Mary, PDQ Bach and Sarah Vaughan. "Beethoven would like what we're doing in Stamford", the ad announced. "So would Louis Armstrong. And James Dean. And Edith Bunker. And Nijinsky."

There is no reason why theaters everywhere sould not follow suit. Nor should this movement towards cultural broadening be ignored by our museums, cinematheques, concert halls and opera houses. Shakespeare, Nora Ephron, Warren Beatty, S.Y. Agnon, Rocky V, Kiri Te Kanawa, Nora Ephron, Stephen Spielberg, Thelonious Monk, Eugene O'Neill, Stephen Sondheim, Woody Allen, Amos Oz and Madonna can easily share the same stage.

Our cultural institutes have to become more responsible. They owe us more than the hubris of defending their own "turf". They owe us an open search for and a careful understanding of what culture has been in our past and what it can become in our future. They owe us experiences wide enough to allow us to understand the value and importance of the popular as well as the classical art forms that surround us. They owe us adequate exposure so that we can sort things out for ourselves, to understand that simply because a form of expressive culture is widely accessible and highly popular it is not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.

© Daniel Rogov