Art Criticism - The State University of New York

symbolism? If the arts only exist to formalize and make articulate our anarchic
Dionysian frenzy in order to purify rationality and help keep the culture on a
level keel, why do critics keep telling artists: "Now don't worry your pretty
little heads about these terrible things," handing them tricky games with which
to amuse themselves? How long before they are allowed to take up grown-ups'
weapons?
Does the eclectic feel that he can jump from one compatibility to
another with complete mobility or nobility like a low-brow checker crowned
king by his public? Some artists' work borrows from so many sources we
crown him original because it's too much trouble to figure out the influences.
The advantage of having a strong personal style in painting is largely
negative in that it allows one to be heard above the roar of mediocrities and
imitators. These egocentric peculiarities distort the messages from the realm of
the ideal. But the lucky parasites who have found their sturdy, banal oak tree
only want to survive the storm, don't expect others to attach themselves to
their own thin identities. The great unifying manner that will put us all above
such survival tactics has yet to arrive. Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg had
influence that seemed almost universal during their reigns, but each has been
superceded. Yet each seemed exactly right for its epoch. To posterity an eclectic
style may seem the most original since it survives to tell its tale and then
bows out. Only when we have set our society in order will the artists feel
secure to relinquish their own personalities to the overwhelming chorus of
earth-praise.
How can any artist continue to exist creatively unless he believes his
work is first rate? To keep going, we mediocrities must convince ourselves that
we are being discriminated against, that however neglected we now are "our
time will come" or that our contribution to the great machine, though miniscule,
is vital. Though some of us feel that in a reversal in revolution we would be on
top, most of us benefit from Capitalism's corrupt largess and chaos.
Fed up with all of the systems we once called faiths, we save in our
Hellenistic torpor the tessarae from the never-to-be-repeated murals of unity;
they give us only scattered insights, at least portable in our journey toward a
new wonder.
When one's sins of omission are seen by others as crimes of commission
one had better examine one's habits. The coward cast as alcoholic exaggerated
to impress his needed bullies what could be more generous or lifeenhancing
than a little hyperbole? Paying for these lies, what virtuosos we
became in the subleties of our poison, what energies we wasted mollifying
hangovers, forgiving ourselves for unreconstructed blackouts. When one is
in the world of strife one is not in the world of art and the anti-arts we once
practiced there have only weakened our real vocations. Of what comfort is
chaotic art in a chaotic time?
44
Art Criticism