Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

The Great White Whale in San Francisco Bay

Or How the “Lively Arts” Became “the Media”

By Lewis Lapham

[This essay appears in the March 2010 issue of Lapham's Quarterly and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]

Art as a medium of exchange is the gift in the hand of its creator, alive in the mind of its beholder, converting the private to a public good, and thereby adding it to the common store of human energy and hope. It’s the embodiment of the spirit in the flesh to which Leo Tolstoy refers as “a means of communion among people… the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of other people,” by “feelings, the most diverse, very strong and very weak, very significant and very worthless, very bad and very good.”

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