Art Criticism - The State University of New York

sible poetry, being in the presence of these canvases gave us a kind of grace or
blessing of being more intelligent than we really were, the burden of deciphering
being taken from us and assumed by suicidal martyrs. It was as though the
down-draughts of dismay of Schoenberg or Bartok were replaced by Webern's
Zen tinkling, a new, less hardbitten approach to the Mystery, since sturm and
drang had failed to crack it.
J. Cage's famous four-minute silence was a concerto for coughing
audience and distant automobile horns, R. Rauschenberg's six white blanks a
surface for angry fingerprints; these closed an era of anti-public dada jokes, a
necessary reenactment of modem art mythology, after which we could begin to
paint and write again, our canvases truly bare for the moral of modem art's
lesson.
"You talked me into it!" the half-convinced art coIlettor exclaims when
the critics and dealers have worn him down with their hard sell. The suddenly
famous artist soon has all of his work accepted without question, but when he
reaches a certain saturation point of overpopularity he is likely to be "revisted"
by house-cleaning esthetes, at which time he is shelved by some mysterious
osmotic legerdemain. Like the high class parvenu his name is linked with, who
ambivalently wants to be accepted as honest and at the same time flaunt his
immunity from the law, this artist is a casualty of our system's inevitable moral
schizophrenia. Naif idealism, not ambitious conniving, helped him to produce
his eclipse.
Are all of these newcomers serving the spirit of art with their pathetic
acrobatics, like the juggler of Notre Dame, even though it is a matter only of
exposing themselves or lettering a subway? But the spirit of art, dragged into
this fool's game, is not mocked; nothing these clowns do can help us with our
problems. Why then are we sometimes amused by these self-deceptions? Or
dignify them with our notice just because they have occurred?
Like the conversation of their fellow New Yorkers who exchange
throughout the week facts they've read in the Sunday Times, the intellectual
fodder of our artists is as predictable as it is limited. Their aim seems to be a
kind of low-grade theatre, like the circuses of their childhood. Magnified to
dignity and portentousness by being stuck on a public wall, their works inspire
reactions far from the poetic insights released by the iconography of a humanism
once treasured. Sentimentalizing violence, their overkill methods make
sterile the grassy realm at their feet that they no longer scrutinize, no longer
sprouting.
Does our new painting and sculpture electrify practical people into
leading richer lives as the inspirational arm of a widely creative culture, or is it
the last twitch of a moribund society? What artist is not vulnerable to perversions
unless he feels some responsibility to a group? But loyalty to a cell of
assassins can be self-defeating. Each little irrational art movement is rounded
vol. 17, no. 1 27