LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

We have all seen the cult of beauty turn to slop. Esthete: an artist who
won’t take pains, who will NOT face the work needed to paint a good
picture, or write a good novel or poem. All fragmentary, nothing total.
And the GREAT perversion, the great decadence, when the painting is
made to sell, when the artist stops wanting to live. Worth his hire,
MUST eat, but EAT secondary AS desire, to will to paint, or to make.
Then to git rich, that is the END, the absoloot end of a painter. Few men
can resist the lure, we all like comfort. That is my weakness and I have
seen men who can do without it. I know no American will much believe
that, and some of the men who can do without it are lunatics and
fanatics. And snobbism doth make coneys of them all. So far as I know,
nobody else had the courage to point out that the German pavilions at
the Binennale di Venezia four years ago was the best. All the little
daubers in the shops, doing Monet and Renoir 60 years late were
shocked by the hardness of outline. It was almost the only pavilion not
rotted with slobber, some more, some less.
The futurist rooms are always an affirmation of propaganda that could
get along by itself without any painting whatever. I mean the main line
of futurist propaganda is an idea, the painting an adjunct. An adjunct that
proves the idea has other dimensions than the merely ideologic. It is a
good idea, it is NOT a WHOLE idea. But it needs plastic expression: it
has imperfect plastic expression, which is a sign of its force. But it does
NOT arise from a plastic need.
Health is CRUEL, or rather health is often accompanied by what seems
cruelty to the baccillus. The man who is totally healthy don’t worry
about baccillae. He isn’t perpetually surrounded by patent medicines,
bottles of disinfectant.
For God’s sake LOOK at your art. When art is subordinate to the picture
dealer, the museum in the United States gets what is LEFT after the
European connoisseur has taken the pick of the billing.