For the last fifteen or twenty years the fashionin criticism or appreciation of the arts h

For the last fifteen or twenty years the fashion

in criticism or appreciation of the arts have been to 【1】______

to deny the existence of any valid criteria and to

make the words "good" or "bad" irrelevant,

immaterial, and inapplicable. There is no such a

thing, we are told, like a set of standards first 【2】______

acquired through experience and knowledge and

late imposed on the subject under discussion. This 【3】______

has been a popular approach, for it relieves the critic

of the responsibility of judgment and the public by the 【4】______

necessity of knowledge. It pleases those resentful of

disciplines, it flatters the empty-minded by calling

him open-minded, it comforts the confused. Under 【5】______

the banner of democracy and the kind of quality

which our forefathers did not mean, it says, in effect,

"Who are you to tell us what is good or bad？" This

is same cry used so long and so effectively by the 【6】______

the producers of mass media who insist that it is the

public, not they, who decide what it wants to hear and 【7】______

to see, and that for a critic to say that this program is

bad and that program is good is pure a reflection of 【8】______

personal taste. Nobody recently bas expressed this

philosophy most succinctly than Dr. Frank Stanton , 【9】______

the highly intelligent president of CBS television. At

a hearing before the Federal Communications

Commission, this phrase escaped from him under 【10】______

questioning: "One man's mediocrity is another

man's goed program".

【M1】