480
PARTISAN REVIEW
the action painter abolishes art. But is it really possible to abolish art?
Will not the esthetic as a category of human experience perversely as–
sert itself, as history did in the Soviet Union by refusing to come to an
end? This in fact is happening to the school of action painters and was
bound to happen regardless of the activities of museum people and
popularizers. 'Once you hang an act on your living room wall, a weird
contradiction develops, which is inherent in the definition (or myth)
of action painting itself; an "event" or gesture becomes, at worst, just
as much an art-object as the piece of driftwood on the coffee-table or
the seashell on the Victorian whatnot. At best, it becomes art. The
truth is, you cannot hang an event on the wall, only a picture, which
may be found to be beautiful or ugly, depending, alas, on your taste.
This applies to a Cimabue "Crucifixion" just as much as to a Pollock
or an African mask. You can decide of a new painting or a painting
new to you that it is "interesting," but this only means that you are
postponing, for the moment, the harder decision as to whether it is
good or bad; a painting cannot stay "interesting," or if you keep on
calling it that you have made "interesting" into an esthetic judgment–
a judgment, by the way, which leads, by the broad path, to the popu–
lous cemetery of the Academy, where all but the immortal are buried
by Father Time.
Mary McCarthy
KITSCH SOCIOLOGY
THE STATUS SEEKERS. By Vance Pockord . David McKay. $4.50.
Vance Packard is to sociology what the
Saturday R eview
no
longer is to literary criticism. He uses as his raw material the products
of academic research; borrows from its d evices, methods and themes;
waters them down and serves them up as sociological
Kitsch.
All the
ingredients that go into artistic
Kitsch
are now being recombined in a
newly emergent field of
Kitsch
sociology.
Packard has assiduously ransacked a great number of sociological
studies, but in his rendering of their results all the shades of meaning
disappear and the findings are falsified by being ripped out of con–
text. The clean lines and delicate colors of the origina l are blurred and
leveled in the spurious reproduction. A few of the elements in Packard's
technique of
Kitsch
sociology are worth noting.
1)
False K nowingness :
Imply that you are in the academic know;
hence, though you have no criteria by which to evaluate seriously a
