Art Criticism - The State University of New York

causing by neglect a bitterness among artists that results in an inferior product.
Our art world is a miserable, . truncated thing, functioning only for an
oligarchy that cannot imagine what a rich and complex pantheon of honored
artists would do for the country. Assuming that there will be a posterity (and
just to keep sane we must have faith in this) it must have a richer choice of what
to select from than it has now.
In the time of the post-impressionists, as now, the critics asked for,
. instead of that poetry, pyrotechnical acrobatics without content. Things have
not changed much. Before he demolishes an artist's reputations the writer of
unintended self-revelations (only distantly inspired by the art he observes)
should try to find out what the artist's intention was. He who expects a bowl of
ice cream will not like it if he is handed soup.
As a battle makes ordinary land sacred, an ordeal on the part of an
"action painter" will sanctify (for properly briefed intellectuals) some rather
undistinguished scrawls. It is these unexamined classics that encumber the
paths of artists uninitiated in swiftly-changing, painterly rituals
The army of mediocrities who keep up unquestioningly with the latest
art styles 2 are just as superficial and opportunistic as were their Nineteenth
Century ancestors, cerebral desiccation having replaced the trivial technicalities
of academic sentiment. An interviewer for Harpers was shocked when
Winslow Homer declared he "wouldn't cross the street to see a Bougereau."
Perhaps the hard-to-understand artists on the crumbling edge of the
avant garde are only trying to produce something that will be too difficult for
the middle class to "raid". We liked certain songs until we learned what the
words meant. Modern art beguiles the weary businessman in his Weltschmerz
until he is told to take it seriously for scientific advancement by zealous critics.
To make heartbreak bearable and to condone violence vicariously are conflicting
and mind-boggling.duties for the simple-hearted artist. Art is more than the
moral substitute for crime; neither is it the receptacle for pain-healing that
religion now fails to supply. For the art zealot it is more kin to science, the
experiments of each new school going deeper into the unknown. To the bourgeois
collector this may be a more plausible reason for its existence than any
solace it once dispensed.
Why does a certain critic use up so much space demolishing those
artists he feels are on the wrong path and so rarely give examples of what he
wants to see more of? Cannot he somehow fit our neglected work into his
scheme? Can it be he has no scheme or is merely afraid to offend his favorites
if he becomes too catholic? It seems natural for a critic to have his favorite
artists among his close friends, yet loyalty as a warm human quality must (by
rights) fade before enthusiasm if something new comes along that is better,
Cool objectivity toward a painting created in a passionate intensity which has
succeeded in moving many people can be explained only as a wish not to
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Art Criticism