ART CH ,RONICLE
THENEWSCULPTURE
Art and literature seem usually to seek their frames of refer–
ence wherever the social mind or sensibility of the given historical mo–
ment finds its surest truth. In the Middle Ages this area of certainty,
or rather of plausibility, coincided with religion, in the Renaissance
and for some time thereafter with abstract reason. The nineteenth cen–
tury shifted the area of plausibility to factual, empirical reality, a notion
that has undergone considerable change during the last hundred years
and always in the direction of a narrower conception of what constitutes
an indisputable fact of experience. Our sensibility has shifted similarly,
demanding of aesthetic experience an increasingly literal order of effects
and becoming more and more reluctant to admit illusion and fiction.
Thus it is not only our society's highly developed division of labor that
has suggested the greater specialization of the separate arts; it is also
our taste for the actual, immediate, first-hand, which desires that paint–
ing, sculpture, music, poetry become more concrete by confining them–
selves strictly to that which is most palpable in them, namely their
mediums, and by refraining from treating or imitating what lies out–
side the province of their exclusive effects. This does not mean what
Lessing meant when he protested against the confusion of the arts;
Lessing still thought of the arts as imitative of an external reality which
was to be incorporated by means of illusion; but modern sensibility
asks for the exclusion of all reality external to the medium of the re–
spective art-for the exclusion, that is, of subject matter. Only by re–
ducing themselves to the means by which they attain virtuality as art,
to the literal essence of their mediums, and only by avoiding as much
as possible explicit reference to any form of experience not given imme–
diately through their mediums, can the arts communicate that sense
of concretely felt, irreducible experience in which our sensibility finds
its fundamental certainty.
This is the complex of factors-by no means stated completely–
that I believe responsible for, among other things, such phenomena as
