The one thing that one was not allowed to rebel against in Modernist and Postmodernist orthodoxy was the tradition of rebellion itself, the basic rule that whatever art one makes must help to bring down the bourgeois market society that supports the arts. The artist's heroic role was to insult the poor mugsies who go to galleries and read poetry and attend concerts. However, the new classicism has resolved to violate this Prime Directive.

RECOVERING TRADITIONS
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 have brought upon us all a realization that conceptual art, incomprehensible "l.a.n.g.u.a.g.e p.o.e.t.r.y", avant-garde performance art, plotless fiction, tuneless music, and inhuman postmodern architecture are not going to be able to deal with the real evil of the world. Only in the great artistic traditions of humankind will we find adequate means of expression. The new movement in the arts, as if it anticipated the need for them, has been busy recovering those traditions.

Who are the new classicists? A strange clan of independent minds, often cheerfully in disagreement with each other, without membership cards and sometimes with large reputations that they have put on the line? As The Utne Reader (a leading avant garde journal) ruefully expressed it, there is
"a classical revival that threatens to bury the avant garde."

To understand what the new classicism is up to, we must first recognize the broad outlines of what happened to the arts in the twentieth century, through a hundred years of modernism followed by its postscript, postmodernism. In poetry, rhyme and meter were rejected, as well as the power of storytelling and even the structure of argument and logic. Even in fiction, plotting was demoted to popular entertainment, and for a while, the "plot less novel" of Alain Robbe-Grillet and William Burroughs was all the rage. In painting and sculpture, any reference to the real human figure and real landscapes was often discarded, together with the traditional techniques of drawing, perspective, and so on that make possible that marvelous imitation of the inner and outer worlds. In music, melody and tonality became old-fashioned, and the twelve tone row and atonality reigned supreme in "serious" composition. In theater, Brecht told playwrights to avoid the dear old corny devices of acting, the conventions of comedy and tragedy that allow an audience to recognize and identify with a character.

Playwrights aimed at the "alienation effect" and attacked the audience in the theater of cruelty. In architecture, as Tom Wolfe has pointed out, the Bauhaus aspired to a kind of building that was functional for machines but not for human beings. In all the arts there was a rejection of transcendental morality, a hostility to any reference of a spiritual world, an angry denigration of American and European history, and a contempt for the classical Western values.