Caroline Kulak 1

Response to Parks Essay

In her essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” Susan Lori Parks devises a

tripartite system of ‘traditions’ to communicate her outlook on the past, present and

future. The first of these traditions, the so-called Great Tradition, surely earns its

appellation of greatness. It is what the public typically imagines as tradition, the cannon

of previous work that rises in an ever expanding wave behind the current arts. Some say

modern art stands in the shadow of this wave, other see new art as running far ahead. The

second tradition is less easily, codified. Parks personalizes tradition in her concept of the

Personal Tradition. This entity is comprised of both an artists’ previous body of work

(which she refers to as BOW) as well as the artist’s talent and body of personal

experience. These three coalesce into a tradition as descriptor of the artist in the moment.

The Personal is the immediate and the current.

In describing the third tradition, the Tradition of the Next New Thing, Parks asks,

or rather demands her reader examine the question: “What is our greatest fear?” (vis-à-vis

the future of the creative). Her advice is to maintain an open, non-predictive stance

towards the potential evolution, advancement, or decline of any particular artistic

discipline since “change is frightening” but also “a part of life”. Yet, in the process of

explaining this more laissez-faire view, she dismisses plans that “take to the streets” on

behalf of the arts as ineffectual, a “course of action [that] cannot ensure the future”. This

is perhaps the most dangerous idea in her piece. While it is true that humans both

collectively and individually must accept the inevitable of change, to promulgate the idea

that there is no influencing that change flies in the face of the first of her aforementioned

traditions: The Great Tradition. There are myriad artists in this Great Tradition (Lennon

and Ono, even Michael Moore) who are great precisely because they recognize the
 Caroline Kulak 2
Response to Parks Essay

potential of the physicalized protest in art and life. To truly respect ‘tradition’ as an artist,

one must recognize the strong precedent of physicalized protest action by artistic

forefathers, rather than simply point to “the berlin wall” and hope for the best in what is

at heart nihilistic apathy.