Art Criticism - The State University of New York

ic he realize that artists suddenly full of ideas should be watched carefully (in
both senses). Wanting the badges of culture, the collectors are also a little
ashamed of things of the spirit, especially when they can't understand them.
But seeing such high price tags on these paintings, they were reassured of
their own religiously materialistic kinship to these rare birds. (We outsiders
who have not won their respect exhibit a self-deceiving naivete towards the
exploiters amounting to criminal negligence.)
We sophisticates are no longer so amused by the yokels of the "sticks"
since we have been impressed and alarmed by their speed in picking up something
like "pop" art, which was not originally meant for the hope-bleary eyes of
the demonstrative enthusiasts who tend to applaud between the movements
of symphonies at concerts. (Was "optical" art invented by sadists to wound
these eyes?) We are forced to realize now we're all in this together, all homesick
for an austere decency that will arm us for our dismaying adventure in this age.
Everything today is tragic, but some things played sweetly out of
tune are more tragic than others. That will cost you a little more.
The body's convulsions, from sneeze to orgasm; let us expel unwanted
matter-this is what abstract expressionism's shudder and dance of
revulsion was aiming to do until we drifting searchers, suddenly enchanted by
the loveliness that was its by-product, began to exalt as almost sacred objects
that which had up to that time been considered as effects subservient to a
larger vision. Like the centripetal brittle fragmentations of Anton Webern's
musical notes, what had once escaped our attention or annoyed us became a
refreshment and then an addiction. Soon it was one of the laws of the art
world-Chow quickly we make them!)-that all that didn't conform to this
atomization was suspect. As the constellation of Castro and Pollock ascended,
we even convinced ourselves that it had politically leftist credentials in its
freedom from connotation's despotism. But in its increasing purity there was a
liberating regime as static as reaction's. Bureaucratic machine's servants can't
afford to even feel self-contempt, let alone show it.
9. TRYING ro AWAKEN FROM ART HISroRY' S NIGHTMARE
The thought of Spengler and Toynbee doomsdays has helped many
fact-bewildered historians through sleepless nights. Like drowners, our artists
seem to be recapitulating the history of our culture in a flash, but not ingenuously.
Not since Lyly's "Euphues" have we seen so many conceits in our
writing. Over-consciousness in areas that don't matter makes us numb in soul,
where awareness is everything. But the tragedy is that the apex from which we
are supposed to be declining has yet to ocCur. Like faith-healers, we prefer to
order intolerable multiplicities or swallow the grim :nedicine, of nature we suspect
is only a placebo. Perhaps the apocalyptic cloud's spectra of off-whites
38
Art Criticism