1138
PARTISAN REVIEW
science and trying to illustrate its new explanation of the nature of
matter; the artist works much more empirically than that and, regardless
of what goes on in other fields, tries simply to make an aesthetically ef–
fective object in compliance with the demands of his own sensibility and
that of his audience. His relation with science--or philosophy or religion
-is owed to the fact that, in our age as in every other, the highest
aesthetic sensibility rests on the same basic assumptions, conscious or
unconscious, as to the nature of reality as does the advanced thinking
contemporaneous with it. What the mechanism is by which such as–
sumptions penetrate to all departments of culture, almost simultaneously
it would seem, has not yet been satisfactorily explained, but that they do
is indisputable. . . .
Our period presents a picture of discord, atomization, disintegra–
tion, unprincipled eclecticism, etc., etc. How then does the new unity of
style in the visual arts fit into it? I can reply only by hazarding that
the picture may be deceptive because incomplete. Despite all appear–
ances to the contrary, our age may still contain a new principle of
unity in itself; I seem to see one being generated empirically out of
certain solutions dictated by the novel problems of an industrialized and
urbanized society. This principle may not yet have been adequately
argued in words, but I feel it to be already confirmed in art and tech–
nics-wherever man has to cope with matter. One of the prime causes of
the ills of our age is, possibly, that it resists its own principle of unity.
The spirit or style of an age is seen at its most unmistakable in the
new
ways in which it shapes and handles physical substance.
If
so, the
style of ours-and in this I see its principle of unity-is characterized by
economy, directness and consistency in the fitting of means to ends: in
a word, by the practice of rationalization. Rationalization in the in–
dustrial sense, a frightening idea by now, but so only because it has
never been put into effect completely and courageously enough: as a
method, that is, by which to determine ends as well as means. The new
art style breathes rationalization. It makes more explicit and prominent
than ever before that economy of means which has always been in–
dispensable to successful works of art.
It
does not rationalize art-which
is impossible-but it produces an art that answers the temper of men
who know no better way of attaining an end than by the rationaliza–
tion of every means thereto. This art is one of the few manifestations of
our time uninflated by illegitimate content-no religion or mysticism or
political certainties. And in its radical inadaptability to the uses of any
interest, ideological or institutional, lies the most certain guarantee of
the truth with which it expresses us.
