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】