Art Criticism - The State University of New York

ut the only metamorphosis that will transcend the humiliating ephemera around
us will be as inexplicable by that evanescence as a larva's conception of its
winged future.
There are the juicy parts of a painting and there are the bony and
gristled parts, without which the former would not exist. The intelligentsia, in
its stoic masochism, aims to be above the lure of delectation that the public
rifles and then discards. Commendable, but sometimes the crowd excels the
critic in intuition, as when the latter at long last jettisons certain sacred monstrosities
(L. Eilshemius, Archipenko) that the public never accepted in the
first place. Extrapolating on the basis of carrying to extremes an effective style,
like the anguish of early Webern and Schoenberg strung out in desiccation of
our present serial academy, this self-laceration is becoming ludicrous, untenable.
(E.g., the journalistic surrealism of the New York Times' current sick and
ugly political cartoons, a belated homage to insights in pioneer surrealists,
must seem embarrassingly inappropriate to readers of more as well as those of
less sophistication, who might have savored this kind of shock treatment at an
earlier time but now want something more mature, even more esthetic.) But the
vanguard is listened to as never before, out of a fear of solecisms by the new
rich-as powerful as the priesthood that ignored Van Gogh and Gauguin.
7. THEHAILOWEDSHOOTINGGALLERY
Our recently established freedom to do anything we want in art only
frightens some artists who crave restraints from above because of timidities
more spiritual than marketplace. Looking back, those now forbidden kingdoms
of ordered paint that required such difficult academic visas may soon seem
desirable to us from our prison of anarchy where authorities warn us to be new,
different. Yet a whiff of modern art's destructive, impious euphoria makes one
quickly an addict to its rather insensitive "sense of rumor." One soon forgets
the more solemn introspective uses of art. Now the newly-enfranchised vanguard
takes up eccentricities that are increasingly bizarre and destructive, are
initially flattered, then disgusted when the status quo public they intended to
mock begins to ape them without style. Vowing, like Cezanne, that pragmatists
will never get their hooks in them, they retreat into pride, untempered by real
adversity. A little too sybaritic about country pleasures, these languid landescapists
dare not excavate the blood-soaked earth beneath their summer greens.
Nowadays we are so busy helping the critics on our side dispose of
the junk that has accumulated on the surfaces of the paintings in our institutions
that we don't have time or energy to replace them with our own more
refined rubbish. The fallow surfaces of hardly blemished canvases surround
us, blind men staring at each others waiting for fertilities.
How can they deny their starved furies, these geometricians who
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