Art Criticism - The State University of New York

nized age. How close, yet how seemingly far, are these yea-sayers with their
"work ethic" involving strife and vindication from the serene hypnotic drifters
like Debussy and Whistler to whom serendipities seemed to descend effortlessly?
In the magical childhood of the synthesis from nightmare and reverie
that may finally bless the venerable eccentric who has earned a difficult mysticism
we may, as in the "grace" of Beethoven's last quartets, feel that something
is being perfected that will be useful for us in the future if we wish
ardently enough to become universal artists, to touch all with a distillation of
the love we feel inarticulately and which is the hope and faith in the Creator's
mercy that we on Earth produce as naturally as a bee produces honey.
Modem art criticism often resembles psychoanalysis in that the ability
to learn and apply an intricate ritual is more important than any originality of
insight the transmitter of the faith may have. Nostalgia for the Weltschmerz or
pathetic fallacies of outmoded art will distract and incapacitate those dedicated
to the stringent stoicism of modem art's dry-eyed purgational method.
The small, manageable list of artists who are the building blocks of most critical
articles makes one think that the authors have a dread of a multiplicity that
might shatter their faith in the myth. It was a struggle for them in the first place
to get these outrageous devices accepted by a small public, but once initiated
to novelties, that public seems to want stronger stuff, and the critics are loath
to look too far afield, cherishing as they do their stable tamed to become
household words. It is this ability to move about in a real world, comparing,
rejecting, combining, that the powerless artist envies in the critic. In his lonely
studio, not too aware of what others are doing, he is curious about the mobility
of that critic, a mobility which the artist, a little too close to the battlefield for
comfort, often relinquished in favor of the kind of solipsism shown by couchbound
psychoanalysts.
The jaded esthetes, in their petulant ennui, have stumbled onto Nineteenth
Century literary painting, but it soon will be returned to the dusty attic.
Maybe such fickleness is healthy, leavening our monolithic involvement with
the new-but why this re-rewarding of kitsch by a posterity that (until lately)
was embarked on giving belated justice only to the neglected of that age? We
have our own sentimentalities as sickening as the Victorians' -tropisms up to
now settled solely on certain destructive artifacts that were intended only to
be weapons against "literary" complacencies, and which display no intrinsic
love or even warmth.
As Christ the eschatologist might have been impatient with his activities
as psychologist and healer, so the victim of today's world-angst man
degrades St. Paul's caritas in favor offaith or hope. Love, the vital center of our
art up to now, is hard to find among our new icons meant only to exorcise fear;
they cannot bear the weight of our agony. The esthete has little compassion
for those love-hungry masses who want to hear over and over the time-tested
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