The metaphor of hero is endemic to our culture. Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship said it over a century ago: without them, we would have no form for our lives. Heroes mark the way. (Remember John-caleb Bingham's painting of Daniel Boone leading the settlers into Kentucky?) Heroes show us how it is. (Remember Gericault's Wounded Cuirassier?) Heroes make the discoveries by which we all live for centuries after. (Remember Joaquin Miller's Columbus, sailing on, and on; remember Thomas Edison, brooding long into the night and watching his first lamp that did not go out?) I think Longfellow said, "Lives of great men all remind us/ We, too, can make our lives sublime;/ And, departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time." When Carlyle listed some heroes, they were people like Homer, Virgil and Shakespeare, and they were heroic because the world they created, their footprints in the sand, left prints we walk in yet. That's why their names are still found in the high friezes of older library reading rooms, and one knows the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a real temple of the muses because names like theirs are carved in the rotunda at the springing of the vault.

But all that, from Carlyle and Longfellow to Arthur Brown (architect of the SFMOMA), is nineteenth century, and the nineteenth century tradition of hero goes back all the way to the most ancient tribal societies, the ones founded by gods that gave agriculture and the alphabet, or men like Prometheus who stole the fire. Now, in the late twentieth century, that SFMOMA interior has only a few years left until remodeling, and I expect that when remodeling comes, if it has not already, the names of those honored dead will disappear.

I think the last great expression of the belief in cultural heroes may have been Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe. (When I was a sophomore in college, I met a woman who told me she read that book every year. On her recommendation, I read it too. But only one reading was enough to infect me with the incurable nineteenth century belief in the power of Great Personalities in art.) The novel ends with the hero, a composer, carrying an infant, the new day, on his shoulder across the river of time and night. Not long after Rolland finished the book, that whole idea of the hero was washed away in the river of night that was the First World War. And the new day, when it came, was not one Christophe could ever have carried, because it was the age not of the great individual living to embody a cultural ideal, but of great masses living to fulfill their appetites for consumer goods.

Shortly after I got out of college, the philosophers of the time and culture after the First World War seemed to me to have been people like Jose Ortega y Gasset and Karl Jaspers. Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses and Jaspers' Man in the Modern Age were my bibles when I came to realize that the concept of heroic greatness in culture, as I had inherited it from the nineteenth century, was no longer viable. All I can remember now from The Revolt of the Masses is that our times are "higher," more pregnant with potential than ever before in the history of man, but that somehow the only cultural value has come to be popularity—not what the program was but how many people attended the concert.

How little one remembers, twenty years later, of the books that shape one's life. Of Man in the Modern Age, I remember only the magisterial tone of Jaspers' dispassionate analysis of a culture in collapse. That book was published in the year I was born, and a whole depression and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and another world war later, there we all were yet, with cultural ideas based on heroic ideals, but cultural facts based on mass markets and consumerism.

The age of mass markets and consumerism reduces even greatness and heroism to mere celebrity, and so with proper regard for democracy Andy Warhol said, "Everyone should be famous for fifteen minutes." When they redo the last of the old interior at SFMOMA, they should take down Velasquez's name, but not put up Pollock's or Picasso's, rather put up all the pages from all the phone books from everywhere. In the mid-1950’s one could resolve the problem of having a personal identity in the midst of a mass culture by becoming "beat." But now, at the end of the 1970’s, what to do? There's got to be a way to get greatness away from mass consumerism and the Book of the Month Club, from art dealers who need to sell things, from museum directors who need to make it at the box office and from college professors who need tenure. There must be a way to return the high esthetic and intellectual and spiritual adventure to the individual, wherever and whoever he or she may be. There's got to be a way to let high art become a cottage industry, and I don't think macrame is the answer. But what is?