Art Criticism - The State University of New York

The little nonsense that wise men relish is usually so stereotyped and
self-conscious that it disgusts zealous youth. We try to keep ourselves young
by returning to childhood, feeding children impractical fantasies, knowing that
too soon they will don the crimes of our adulthood; sensitive children know
that they are not being groomed for the idealistic responsibility they want and
that wetell these lies in order that we may return to innocence in our nostalgia.
The artist in our society must feel this way, eager for a strong role in a shared
idealism, but forced to be decorator or comedian. But so chaotic is the "real"
world becoming that he is beginning to seem as valid a guide as anyone else,
a one-eyed king in Armageddon.
Like making a gesture or using a phrase that, unknown to them, is
taboo in the country they are visiting, many otherwise au-courant people
offend plastic artists by not using correctly jargon of modern art, a touchiness
often found in recently liberated minorities. But the literary curiosity in us may
feel rebuffed by artists sending each other secret signals. We feel that they,
like advertising agencies lately, are trying to impress each other more than the
target public. So are we all Balkanized today, the painters in their phobia of the
literary element in art torturing their surfaces with indecipherable significances
that manage to look handsome at a distances and serviceable as chic wall
hangings. So what has been risked? Painting and sculpture are still where they
always were, in the salon as conversation pieces.
If one is unfortunate enough to be cursed with a gift oflyrical melodic
inventiveness in an era that only accepts dissonant fragmentatipn, one must
realize that those who have become used to serial music find .consonant harmonies
just as repellent as We once found theirs. They can no longer afford the
luxury of tears and probably regret it in their unrelieved dry rage. But if from
this arises the austere grandeur of a "Mathis der Maier" we are inspired to
continue farther on this rocky path toward an unfathomable objectivity beyond
self-indulgence. The dislocations of cubism and constructivism are in
painting the puritanical regimen that encourage candor, the honesty that is the
one thing we can be proud of in our era. These harshnesses comfort us and
help us survive the horrors we uncover in our relentless exhumations. In the
moratorium on harmonic illusions these pioneers get nourishment only from
each other. But as the self-flagellation becomes an epidemic the melodist sings
more and more only to himself, a child of another age of romantic self-deception,
harmless but out of key.
The art of abstraction has something furtive and unlawful about it as
in a symbol of a suppressed political movement or pornography's pathetic
shorthand. Conditioned by a fragment of what we cannot know in its wholeness,
our reaction to these signals is unhealthy and stunted. A photo of an
auto accident onexual act is sometimes more shocking than the actual event in
situ. Picasso's distortions stir us more than trompe I' oeil or the non-objective.
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Art Criticism