I am constantly returning to a sentence that Tadeusz Kantor uttered during some television interview, shortly before his death in 1990. The sentence was uttered just shortly after the great political transformation that swept Poland. Kantor was talking about his theater, when suddenly he turned to politics. He said (more or less): "I have been closely following everything uttered by these new political men of ours. You know what has made an impact on me? Not a one of them has ever even once said the word 'art.'"

Kantor used the word 'art' because it seems he prefered the term to that of 'culture.' He continued speaking, with an inclination towards radical intonation and gesticulation: "not once has the word 'art' been spoken! This is a disgrace! And they will lose because of it!" One must recall that these words fell at a time when our political representatives were, at least from our perspective, people of broad horizons; a humanist class. Despite this fact, indeed the word 'culture,' let alone 'art' was not a very popular slogan for our fledgling democracy. Kantor's words seemed painfuly true to me then, although even today I get the feeling that for those times, his words were over the top. Politicians of our day have no idea what the meaning of 'art' is for the framework of social change, because they are themselves rarely men of art (by men of art I mean people with an authentic and deep need for art). Politicians of our day do not like real, reflective , radical, searching art because su