Frank Lloyd Wright interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1957

Photo by Al Ravenna and the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

In 1957, Mike Wallace conducted a two part interview with Frank Lloyd Wright, spanning topics from Christianity to modern art. It’s been made available by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and can be viewed here.

Here are Wright’s thoughts on certain types of criticisms of modern art:

Wallace: What do you think of modern paintings that some people say look like scrambled eggs, some people say that serious modern music sounds like a bad night in a boiler factory.

Wright: I’ve heard all those reactions, and don’t you think we all see as we are? And our reactions will be that reaction which is most characteristic of us ourselves. And every time we express a reaction of this sort, we give ourselves away. Somebody said that the museum out here on Fifth Avenue looked like a washing machine. That’s one of my buildings. But I’ve heard a lot of that type of reaction, and I’ve always discarded it as worthless. And I think it is.

Here are some prickly opinions on “the common man”:

Wallace: What do you think of the average man in the United States who has little use for your ideas in architecture, in politics, in religion?

Wright: Are you speaking of the common man?

Wallace: The average man, the common man, I think that you have sometimes called him part of the mobocracy—part of the mob.

Wright: He’s the basis of it. I think the common man is responsible for the drift toward conformity now. It’s going to ruin our democracy, and is not according to our democratic faith. I believe our democracy was Thomas Jefferson’s idea. I mean I think Thomas Jefferson’s idea was the right idea, but we were headed for a genuine aristocracy. An aristocracy that was innate, on the man, not of him…not this by privilege but his, by virtue of this own virtue, his own conscience, his own quality, and that by that we were going to have a rule of the bravest and the best. But now that the common man is becoming a little jealous of the uncommon man, as H. I. Phillips wrote the other day, “It’s getting to the point where” he said… “Well, what’s the punk got we ain’t got? He’s just got the breaks that’s all.” Now that’s going to ruin the common man, because the uncommon man is his vision. And I believe what you call the common man is what I call the common man, a man who believes in nothing he can’t see, and he can’t see anything he can’t put his hand on. He’s a block to progress.

Wallace: …a pretty fair share of our audience tonight either can’t, or doesn’t want to, understand modern art like the paintings of Picasso or modern music, let’s say by Stavinsky; possibly they don’t even know, don’t even want to or cannot understand you. What do you think of these people who either don’t understand or don’t care?

Wright: I don’t think they matter as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think they’re for me, so why should I be for them?

Watch the entire video here.

(via Signal vs. Noise)