Bohemian life in the Village was, in the twenties, quite elegant--even patrician, for it attracted the rich as well as writers, painters, and radicals. The old Village was a grand success, and for a time New York really was the center of the country for certain rare and valuable qualities. Its free versers, free lovers, elegant boozers, its rich ninnies and eccentrics, its artists and revolutionists, charmed and heartened the younger generation, strengthening their resistance to the ugliness and philistinism of the hometown.
All that, of course, is over. New York is now the business center of American culture, the amusement of frivolity center, the excitement center, the anxiety center. But it has no independent and original intellectual life. It provides no equilibrium, it offers no mental space to artists. Ideas are no longer discussed here...
New York is the principal processor and distributor of the mental goods consumed by the American public. The present leaders of culture in New York are its publicity intellectuals. These are college-educated men and women who have never lived as poets, painters, composers, or thinkers but who have successfully organized writing, art, thought, and science in publishing houses, in museums, in foundations, in magazines, in newspapers (mainly the New York Times), in the fashion industry, in television, and in advertising. All of these things have been made to pay and pay handsomely.
I do not think anyone will fly in today from Boise, Idaho eagerly seeking in New York other writers whose love of poetry is pure or who are waiting on the steps of the public library like Athenians to discuss Existence or Justice. The publicity intellectuals have little interest in such matters. They read little, and they don't gather to talk about literature. Cultural New York founds its prosperity on the former presence of these great things and keeps up the illusion that they are still present. New York is a great marketer of echoes. The past is profitably translated into Village rentals and real estate values, into meal prices and hotel rates.
--Saul Bellow., "New York: World Famous Impossibility" (1970)
