Dumbing Down

Dramatist Friedrick Schiller and the late David Foster Wallace both wanted to lift their audience up instead of write down to them; their opinions are excerpted in Lapham’s Quarterly. Schiller wrote, “The assertion so commonly made, that the public degrades art, is not well founded. It is the artist that brings the public to the level of his own conceptions, and in every age in which art has gone to decay, it has fallen through its professors.”