America's Best

By Richard Lacayo

World's fairs, those jamborees of national output--what ever happened to them? The Belgian waffles, the Futurama architecture, it all used to seem so important. Yet the U.S. didn't even bother to erect a pavilion for the one last year in Hanover, Germany. And, really, why should it have? Who needs to stand in line outside a geodesic dome to find out what America produces? Who needs a product-display center to discover Lucinda Williams? Or a monorail to take you to Philip Roth or Tom Ford? Anywhere in the world you find a movie screen or a museum, a bookstore or a TV, a clothing outlet or a computer terminal, you're at the entrance to the American pavilion.

This is because the U.S. has become the world's largest producer and distributor of enjoyments. Some of these are pleasures no more complicated than Britney Spears. Some are sterner stuff, made by artists working in subtler ways (or at least in more conservative wardrobes) and beyond the noise of the cash registers. But among the artists, whether they make rap songs or novellas, sitcoms or Cibachrome prints, dance steps or designer spike heels, there are increments of quality. They lead upward from the figures who are merely (though sometimes massively) popular to the ones who are truly accomplished--in other words, to the best.

For this first installment in a five-part series on America's best in many fields, we've chosen people who represent the highest quality in 21 categories in the arts and entertainment. Not so fast. Did someone say "quality"? In a democratic culture, there may be no ground more contested than that one. Americans have never been comfortable with elite judgments. And elites have rarely found common ground with mass taste. So culture becomes the front line where the guardians of excellence meet the forces of popularity, and both insist their yardsticks are the ones that matter.

Enter Julia Roberts, bearing an Oscar. In this free-market free-for-all, she epitomizes the paradox of being the best. Is Roberts the best American actress? That little statue is a sign that she can sometimes be a screen presence to reckon with, but in any ballot of the most accomplished performers, she would meet heavy competition from Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Julianne Moore and Kathy Bates, to name a few. But Best Movie Star? No contest. And that's because she is the biggest female box-office draw, even in films that are often of so-so quality. She does best the thing that only movie stars do. By the mysterious force of her public persona, she digs a channel into our most closely guarded yearnings.

It was Susan Sontag who observed, in her famously acute essay "Notes on 'Camp,'" that "the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement... The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure." (Or, as Amanda says in Noel Coward's Private Lives, "Extraordinary, how potent cheap music is.") All the same, American culture moves so readily to legitimize the latest enthusiasms of mass taste--snowboarding! game shows! Irish step dancing!--that it always seems in danger of overwhelming art that demands quieter attention. The devilishly effective machinery of American pop culture turns our attention constantly to whatever is loud, vivid, swaggering.

O.K., but great art is born all the time out of what is loud, vivid and swaggering, or even conventional and sentimental--in short, out of the primordial ooze of low culture. Consider the modern novel. In the hands of a master like Philip Roth, it can register the smallest vibrations of the interior life or the broadest convulsions of the wider world. But when it emerged as an art form in the 18th century--springing from a flux of cheap pamphlets, folktales, adventurers' memoirs and religious allegories--it was widely despised as philistine trash, a plaything for an undiscriminating middle class that was hooked on gaudy sentiments and cliffhanger narrative. What we now know is that the verse play and epic poem were about to be shuffled to the margins of the collective mind, while the novel was on its way to becoming the great and subtle device it remains.

Enter DJ Craze, bearing a turntable. You won't find him performing at Carnegie Hall. Like the early jazz musicians, who performed in speakeasies and brothels, he plays for an audience that's out for a good time. Like the early novelists, his primary source material is in the drift heaps of mass culture. But from those things he produces work that's not just enjoyable but also edifying: his abrupt couplings of borrowed sound--a riff sampled off an old 45, a scrap of dialogue from an old movie--point us to connections we've never made before.

For all that we talk about the "cutting edge" in America, the plainest evidence of mastery comes from men and women who have thought hard about the past and whose work builds ingeniously but simply upon it. The choreographer Susan Stroman is a living repository of Broadway dance history. The excellence of Cassandra Wilson is a function of her mastery of the canon of the jazz vocal that she so beautifully extends.

What else links our choices? How different they all are. To the extent that the U.S. is a land of the utmost diversity, a transmission point through which the energies and intuitions--the people--of every other nation pass, it enjoys what economists call competitive advantage in the global balance of talent. So the best American director can hail from Taiwan, the best American artist can be an African American who takes inspiration from village crafts in Sierra Leone and the best American fashion designer can be a kid from Texas whose showrooms are in Paris and London. In the end, they stand as examples of Yankee ingenuity, if only because the U.S. was smart enough to gather them all in.

Still want to find your way to the American pavilion? One way to get there is by turning the page.