Art Criticism - The State University of New York

pain in the eyes of the cripple gives humility to the arrogant striders, and it is
. only some flawed beauty in the painting that will allow us to open its thorny
hide as it hangs half-hceded on the wall, divested of any theatricality it may
once have had for the overeager parvenus at the vernissage of historicity.
Willow buds, fuses that set off Spring's slow explosion, nourish annual
daydreams. We happy few who know that beauty is its own reward are
quickly put out into our desired pastures by our pragmatic cognoscenti.
Artists whose love for another person is unrequited are perhaps luckier
in their fruitful frustration than the lovee, who, has only the sterile satisfaction
of satiated vanity.
In the sweetness of the years before our revolution, hamadryads
(who in the words of Dawn Powell "appealed to men of all sexes") attended
possessively the abstract expressionist revelers who, if they insulted their
companions while drunk were sure to apologize later if the perpetual party
seemed endangered by bad feelings. Bare life was rarely to be faced, too many
commitments were made, everything fell due at once. Why urinate in the gas
tank except from despair at some unnamable injustice to which the artists gave
silent assent? Since their demise the more pragmatic jokers of our art world, like
the President's men caught breaking and entering, don't have much "style."
To a pragmatist, a coward is someone with too much imagination.
Desensitized, the former have shut down most of their valves and windows
and barge ahead grimly, knowing intuitively that Earth was created for them,
mute guzzlers of Nature's stew, more meat than vegetables.
By absorbing so sedulously the biographies of our culture heroes,
we extend our own years not only with vicarious identifications but by snarling
in an unproductive way our life lines into detours of meaningless intrigue,
from which we emerge with the kind of depression we get after watching too
much television. But how else is one inspired to continue in the heartbreaking
career of artist? No wonder we want to inhabit that over-rewarded and underpopulated
pantheon. Yet the only artist worth remembering is the one who
. doesn't give a damn about this arbitrary elite. Great artists' lives were not held
together only by their art.
Does painting take a perverted pleasure in its adjutant role, second
fiddle to the more public arts? Are poets vindicated by our common breakdown
in which their oppressors are brought low? Could either take command
of the machi:tery of a society where anyone who "behaves nice" is taken for a
crook and boors are called "diamonds in the rough"? Or pass tests where the
correct answers are the quickly changing cliches of current fashion? I want to
believe that some people will always be around who do not admire the public
men who traffic in human weakness, and whose only success will be to influence
toward decency by their unworldly dedication those who advise legislators
and judges.
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Art Criticism