The 7 Lively Arts

by Gilbert Seldes

Intelligent, engaging discussions of slapstick, comic strips, vaudeville, and other elements of popular culture and their relationship to such traditional art forms as opera, ballet, drama, and classical music. Tributes to Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and a host of other celebrities. 28 illustrations.

Genres: Art, History

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Gilbert Vivian Seldes (/ˈsɛldiːz/) was an American writer and cultural critic. Seldes served as the editor and drama critic of the seminal modernist magazine The Dial and hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz (1958). He also wrote for other magazines and newspapers like Vanity Fair and the Saturday Evening Post. He was most interested in American popular culture and cultural history. He wrote and adapted for Broadway, including Lysistrata and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1930s. Later, he made films, wrote radio scripts and became the first director of television for CBS News and the founding dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

He spent his career analyzing popular culture in America, advocating cultural democracy, and subsequently, calling for public criticism of the media. Near the end of his life, he quipped, "I've been carrying on a lover's quarrel with the popular arts for years ... It's been fun. Nothing like them."

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book at a used book store because it was at the intersection of my interest in arts criticism especially of the "low" arts and the fact that I am obsessed with early 20th century writing about non-serious topics because it all seems so inconsequential and funny, and if I had been looking for one or the other I would have liked this a lot less.

The not fun parts of this were that he is pretty astoundingly racist - it took me over halfway through the book to remember/ realise that the dude he consistently portrays as the best the American arts have to offer is (exclusively) a blackface comedian/musician, and he's like, really into DW Griffith, and there's a chapter I straight up skipped called "The Darktown Comes to Broadway" which... yikes.

And, when in his white little bubble, he's a charming essayist who is clearly a proto-hipster who's totally anti-gentrification or whatever, and is a fascinating window into the state of the arts in 1924, and wrote the book in France completely without references/from memory, and then wrote comments on the book for when it was reissued in 1957 which are hilariously critical, and made some alarmingly sharp predictions (as well as some comically off ones). So. All this and more.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1924 Seldes (primarily a drama critic) addressed what he considered to be the popular (not high culture) arts of the time: comic strips, movies, musical comedy, vaudeville, radio, popular music, and the dance. The edition of this book that I have was an update he did in 1957, with comments on some of his previous opinions. It was, of course, of interest to learn of what was all the rage in 1924. Some names are still familiar, others I've never heard of. However, I'm sure the song, "I Picked up a Lemon in the Garden of Love" would be quite entertaining.;-) Seldes was a huge fan of Al Jolson and Fanny Brice, to name two performers whose fame has endured. I found it charming that Seldes devoted an entire chapter to the "Krazy Kat" comic strip, which some might recognize.

In his updated comments he deals with how the terminology for Black Americans has changed. After quoting an offensive song lyric he says that it "Could be used without giving offense in 1924. To use it now (1957) would be gratuitously insulting...I hope the change in our vocabulary means that a change in feeling has occurred, because it is of small value to suppress a word but keep the thought." I thought this quote quite appropriate to the present.

[Keith Hendricks · Rating 5 out of 5]

While some conscious and unconscious racism informs The 7 Lively Arts, “The Great God Bogus,” and the two essays after it remain exceedingly relevant, and the two famous pieces on Krazy Kat and other comic strips are well worth reading if you’re interested in sequential art.

[Nathanael Greene Slater]

Arts c.1924

[WILLIAM SEATON]

My essay on Seldes' groundbreaking book, titled "Another Look at The Seven Lively Arts," is available on my blog at http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/201....