Art Criticism - The State University of New York

maiden" of Marxism (unless things get worse they won't revolt). Thought here
is that gray matter that is the enemy of good painting.
Are we' in this country still expected to share, at this late date, the
iconoclastic fury of European artists and writers of the last generation? The
complacencies they fought have changed so completely that we have begun
to get a little curious about them: were they so smothering as to merit the
overkill of futurism and other sects? This good fight is the essence of the
raison d'etre of our liberated art schools (whose students, I have noticed,
usually seem miserable, quarrelsome, haggard). A sentimentality has grown up
about this continuing universal revolution, never resting long enough to build
up scar tissue. In this tradition, debates at the New York artists' club in the
Fifties were usually refreshingly ad hominem, like husbands and wives who,
out of fear of each other, fight only in the presence of others.
"Fishing in murky waters", as Freud was accused of doing, has now
become standard in all the arts, not for reasons of increasing self-knowledge
but because even the poor simple-hearted painters in their bucolic cesspool
feel shame if their inspirations spring too ingenuously from a simple joyous
source. Folly to agitate these depths out of fashionable concern; they who
buy art are so busy dying they don't get messages any more from the realms of
innocence.
Untouchables don't necessarily dislike being touched; the wages of
onanistic loneliness are solipsism and in art these grotesquely distorted alienations
rarely speak to each other .
. Seduced into a sentimentality before his aseptic intellect could take
command, the kitsch-sleuth curses himself, looking furtively about him for
observers of his gaffe. He doesn't believe this devil that obsesses him should
be given "equal time".
Ferret out your daily kitsch from the garbage of middlebrow, busy
little vanguardist! The poison you brew is too toxic to be effective, since it
destroys you as well. Better to woo with works of art that draw in the enemy to
a warm fire and meal where he can be sweetly cajoled out of his sentimentality
(part of the coin of hate) with a love ubiquitous as found objects of a culture
discarding its soul with its wastes.
Formalizing an,d specializing the nonsense syllables that primitive
man enjoyed may lead to practical languages but it doesn't nourish the music
and poetry that caused that initial glossalalia to communicate with the spirits
of earth and the gods. In painting, our bottling of the sacred waters of an
inchoate universality surpassing idiosyncrasies results in a limited vocabulary
of forms useful only for decorating walls. Abstracting for purposes of wider
communication, we've lost the subjective phosphorescence of a uniqueness
we all had in common; minute, subtle variations from mind to mind affording
true "style".
36
Art Criticism