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PARTISAN REVIEW
sociologists, students of voting habits and population patterns, are all
engaged in providing identities ("Tell me how you voted and I'll tell
you who you are" or vice versa), showing their publics how they can
yet be somebody through art-appreciation, music-appreciation, good–
design-appreciation, self-appreciation, i.e., knowing Values. As Mr.
Rosenberg says, "Today everybody is already a member of some intel–
lectually worked-over group, that is, an audience."
Mr. Rosenberg himself is a permanent revolutionist in politics and
the arts. Still, sitting in his loge seat in the intervals of partisanship, he
enjoys the farce by which the New is converted into the Old, by being
turned into a profit-commodity, as modern painting has been by fashion
designers, educators, and wallpaper firms; this in fact is the Handwrit–
ing on the Wall. Art movements "sold" to the consumer are consumed
in both senses. The position of the revolutionary critic is itself comically
subject to erosion under these circumstances--a point Mr. Rosenberg
has noted.
His sense of proportion and balance prevents him, almost every–
where ("Politics as Dancing" is the exception), from being mastered
by one of his ideas so that he would fail to see its implications. This
knowing what you are letting yourself in for constitutes audacity. Take
action painting; while arguing strenuously for it, Mr. Rosenberg per–
ceives where the hitch is. Action painting cannot lay claim to being
judged esthetically; by being an act, an experiment, it deliberately re–
nounces the esthetic as its category, for it cannot be recognized by the
pleasure-faculty as objects of beauty are.
If,
indeed, by some accident
-the passage of time or fading-such a painting became beautiful, it
would cease to be an act, since the element of risk and hazard would
depart from it, and it would come, as it were, to rest. In the same way,
an act in history by becoming strikingly beautiful or noble slides out
of the historical arena into a constructed frame-such actions, inci–
dentally, are blsually acts of sacrifice or heroic immolation. They be–
come, precisely, a picture; a tableau or a statue. But if an action paint–
ing cannot be judged esthetically, how can it be judged? Not at all,
cheerfully admits Mr. Rosenberg, though he qualifies this somewhat by
saying that a genuine action painting can be told from a fake by the
amount of struggle in it. This criterion, though, is highly arbitrary–
how is the struggle to be measured and who is to be the judge? Mr.
Rosenberg, then, is taking a risk, with his eyes open, of polemicizing
for a kind of
art
of which no one can say whether it is beautiful or
ugly or in between, but only that it is something, that it exists and rep–
resents a decision. This decisive coming into existence, in fact, is action
painting's best plea for itself-a plea entered in history's court, which
