Art Criticism - The State University of New York

ality.
Is the central unseen event of such importance that we artists are
satisfied with exhibiting these tiny shards that we have picked up far from the
explosion? But a tangible relic of the true cross beats any abstract faith.
The immaculate museum walls are temporarily threatened by the crude
yokelisms of commercial naif artifacts dragged out of context to exhilarate the
jaded. Seeing them in situ we remark that they are our true "pop" art, that it is
only by having been put in a plush setting that they have been given any
validity beyond a banal, pragmatic existence. Yet folk melodies sanitized for
concert halls bore us until we hear then sung by an amateur. Commercial art
cannot survive the metamorphosis in and out of fine art any more than a cheap
commercial non-folk song can. We have yet to invent a sturdy, everyday American
folk art that will flourish on both levels. The naif art that thrills us in
museums has already led a life more exciting than Art; the tiki once smeared
with menstrual blood and kept at a safe distance from a native village has only
been put out to pasture when it decorates an off-white Park Avenue wall.
Modem art's unanchored symbols are the fetishistic shoe without
the foot. The explanatory catalog, the code-book, is as important as the painting
it decodes. An eloquent set of insights has been made literary in a new
sense. The pretentious lore of pseudo-science may make these ambiguous
subjectivities objective to the pragmatistic businessman collector, but are a
block to the neurotic for whom art is a first aid kit, who want purity without
moralistic message.
Our minds are tissues of "screen memories", false memories that hide
events too shameful to remember; these must be unearthed by painful psychoanalysis
where direct search is of no avail. So painting that hits the nail on the
head does not tell the true story, whereas the glancing blows of fantasy intrigue
and hold us; in this irrational fable we remember what ailed us.
8. SIC TRANSIT FUROR SCRIBENDI
Death by neologism and the self-destructing slang of the underworld
are visited upon our language by intellectuals who, by taking up this fashion,
are being counter-snobbistic toward purists. The do-it-yourself kits that debased
the idealism of postwar American art were patronized and encouraged
by critics who may have expected a popular front for non-representational
painting. Eventually such horrors were hybridized that a predictable revulsion
occurred against all sentimental pieties except the drastic purity now judged
sterile enough to resist the epidemic. But the piety that causes the disease,
pride of possession, has not been questioned. Only when this obsolete religiosity
is purged will painting and sculpture rank with the more portable arts.
The critics of Art News were always dignifying by references to litvol.
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