140
HAROLD ROSENBER6
duction, like the blow-up of a fingerprint; once the show has
been
dispersed, only the picture in the catalogue
will
remain as the
visual
representation of the meaning of the work.
The liberation from "literary subject matter" boasted of
by
modem painting and sculpture has been accomplished 'by their
transformation into literature. With images of genre and fable
eliminated, the painting as a whole has become a
word:
one wants
to know what the work "says."
For clues the public turns to the "personality" of the artist
and devours biographies and novels and film romances of artists'
lives as seasQning for its monographs and "studies." Insecure in the
face of art's mysteries the audience appeals to their human source
-and is told by the artist to go back and stand in front of the
canvas.
But while the painting is supposed to speak, it has become
nothing else than what is said about it. In a painting of Pollock or
Still, "criticism" is ground in with the pigments. This coalescence of
art and comment is exemplified by the art book, in which the
artist
and the historian-critic compete for the last word.
As the painting is swallowed up in interpretations of it, the
disparity between its physical reality and its published image van–
ishes or, as we have indicated, the advantage comes to lie with the
latter. The actual work becomes at length simply the mold from
which handier copies have been made: its fate is either to serve the
various uses of the museum or to be collected as a relic of the
artist's person, like fingernail parings or a hand-written manuscript.
By extending its influences beyond the material environment of
the work, that is, by setting itself afloat as "culture," art has suc–
ceeded in achieving value with a public unable to prize it as a
possession.
In America the interest in painting, especially since the
War,
enormously exceeds the buying of it. The market is for
Art
not for
works of art-there are collectors for whom any work by So-and–
So will do; recently, I have heard of sales of unseen paintings con–
summated over the telephone.
