The Culture Elite event recordings
Abstract
New School professor and semiotician Marshall Blonsky moderated the series, The Culture Elite, during the Spring 1993 semester as part The New School's Art and Politics lecture program. Guests included talk show host Charlie Rose, French cultural ambassador Annie Cohen-Solal, art critic and cultural commentator Anthony Haden-Guest, journalist and novelist David Ignatius, sociologist Richard Sennett, and journalist and disability rights advocate John Hockenberry. The collection consists of audio recordings of all advertised guests.
Dates
- 1993 February 12 - March 18
Creator
- Blonsky, Marshall (Moderator, Person)
- Cohen-Solal, Annie, 1948- (Speaker, Person)
- Haden-Guest, Anthony (Speaker, Person)
- Hockenberry, John (John Charles) (1956-06-04) (Speaker, Person)
- Ignatius, David, 1950- (Speaker, Person)
- New School for Social Research (New York, N.Y. : 1919-1997) (Host institution, Organization)
- Rose, Charlie (Charles Peete) (1942-01-05) (Speaker, Person)
- Sennett, Richard, 1943- (Speaker, Person)
Extent
6 1/4 inch Audio Cassette
Language of Materials
English
Scope and Contents
The collection consists of six audio recordings of public conversations conducted by New School professor and semiotician Marshall Blonsky for his non-credit course, The Culture Elite, listed in The New School course catalog under "Special Lectures," in the "Art & Politics" section. There is no known video of the events.
All conversations advertised in the course catalog are present in the collection.
According to a March 1993 article in the university's newspaper, The New School Observer, a gift from philanthropist and New School trustee Vera List allowed programs in the "Art and Politics" series to be recorded and dessiminated to wider audiences. Although the article notes that tapes could be distributed to public radio stations, or used for the basis of online courses (referred to in the article as "distance learning classes"), it is unclear if this happened for The Culture Elite. The New School launched its Distance Instruction for Adult Learners, or DIAL, in the Fall 1993 semester.
Although listed under the heading "Art and Politics" in the course catalog, this conversation series is not documented in the Vera List Center for Art and Politics audiovisual collection event recordings (NS.07.02.03), nor does it appear in the Vera List Center's online archive of sponsored events.
Conditions Governing Access
Collection is open for research use. Please contact archivist@newschool.edu for appointment.
Conditions Governing Use
To publish material from this collection, permission must be obtained in writing from the New School Archives and Special Collections. Please contact: archivist@newschool.edu.
Historical note
The Culture Elite was a special lecture series held at The New School in the Spring semester of 1993 as part of the “Art and Politics” lecture program. The events consisted of a series of conversations between the series moderator, semiotician and longtime New School professor Marshall Blonsky, and guests identified as important voices in shaping the culture of the United States. These guests included talk show host Charlie Rose, French cultural ambassador Annie Cohen-Solal, art critic and cultural commentator Anthony Haden-Guest, journalist and novelist David Ignatius, sociologist Richard Sennett, and journalist and disability rights advocate John Hockenberry.
The New School general course catalog describes the series as follows:
"This discussion of a 'cultural elite' does not use the term disparagingly as some politicians do. We are identifying a group of people who set a certain tone for the discussion of culture in our society. The New School, which has a legacy of introducing important ideas to intelligent adult audiences, inaugurates a series of evenings in which Marshall Blonsky, author of American Mythologies, engages in serious conversation with members of today's cultural elite. They discuss the state of culture in America and of course their own contributions. In the tradition of literary and political discussion groups that have peppered American history, this series is intended to reestablish the delights of the literary salon in our age of special effects. In the late 1960s, around The New York Review of Books, there arose a 'Theater for Ideas' that engaged the sharpest minds writing about culture and politics in that period. Many mourned its loss, and we would like to encourage something like it here."
Sources:
The New School (1993). New School Bulletin 1993 Spring Vol. 50 No. 4 [course catalog]. New School Course Catalog Collection. New School Archives and Special Collections. https://digital.archives.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS050101_ns1993sp
The New School (1993). The New School Observer, Volume 14, Number 2 [periodical]. New School Periodicals Collection. New School Archives and Special Collections. https://digital.archives.newschool.edu/index.php/Detail/objects/NS050601_Observ_199303
Arrangement
Arranged chronologically by date of event.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
The staff of The New School Archives and Special Collections assembled this collection from a larger set of legacy recordings transferred from The New School's Raymond Fogelman Library following the establishment of The New School Archives, circa 2012.
Processing Information
New School Archives staff based all description in this finding aid on course catalog text and audiocassette container inscriptions. Staff did not listen to the tapes to verify content.
- Audiocassettes (Type of Material) Subject Source: Art & Architecture Thesaurus
- Politics and culture -- United States (Subject) (Places) Subject Source: Library of Congress Subject Headings
- Sound recordings (Type of Material) Subject Source: Art & Architecture Thesaurus
- Title
- Guide to the Culture Elite event recordings
- Status
- In Process
- Author
- Jack Wells, Jason Adamo and Jenny Swadosh
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin