PARTISAN HVIEW
the mechanical "gag
l
'
which deadens sensibility and helps to solidify
tameness and conformity. But even
in
the entertainment area, the
faculty of choice has not been entirely erased from "the mass audi–
ence." Separate and severely critical "publics" exist, who reject what
they do not want to hear and see, who buy their own records and
either buy or borrow their own kind of book; who even treat the more
vapid productions of Hollywood with scorn and indifference (listen
to any disabused "neighborhood" audience). Meanwhile, formal
art
infiltrates every field; even in entertainment marks of high formal
procedure turn up from time to time, and no American advertising
artist or lay-out man is totally ignorant of the high formal point
reached by his colleagues in Switzerland and Italy; no commercial
artist is entirely untouched by the more original procedures of con–
temporary design. And during the years that the formal arts have been
stiffening into the cliche, the minor and industrial
arts
have steadily
improved. In the field of mass production the pretentious gadget
soon disappears: the "bloat" in stream-lining; the bleakness in the
house as "a machine for living." The bare boxy angles of the real
estate development "ranch house" are soon treated to some softening,
by the introduction of the hand-made object or the ameliorating
"antique." It is always the minor arts which flourish in an "official"
artistic era; the industrial arts today- textiles, furniture, packaging,
clothes-announce the beginning of a new and livelier period in the
arts as a whole, in the same way that book-illustration and the poster
announced new life,
in
the late nineteenth century.
3. The rediscovery of the springs of creative power cannot be
bound into any simple problem of geography, particularly at present,
when the barriers of time and space are rapidly becoming nonexistent.
The American artist and intellectual must give over expecting the
future to develop according to region or historic example. America
is soaked with Europe, in any case; and there is no sign that Europe,
as it rebuilds itself, may not provide vitality, variety and perspective
for American life, art and thought. For although Carthage never
recovered after its furrows were sown with salt, Rome, like Troy,
rebuilt itself innumerable times; and what may Europe not produce
out of its present ruins? The Italian postwar arts are at the moment
strongly influencing American taste; and American students and a
new kind of tourist are flowing back to Europe in quantity. In ad-
