ART
:flOOKS, BOOK ART,
ART
141
This generalized interest feeds on anything-as the Directors
of the Museum of Modern Art have demonstrated with the suc–
cessful marketing of their membership "package," which for a
single fee supplies admission to exhibition openings (the second
opening; the first is for especially invited guests), tickets to film
showings, service in the terrace cafeteria, discounts on art books.
In addition to being a thing to learn, art has become some–
thing to do; and the art book is one means by which the individual
work is rescued from its corner and brought into the program.
The art book, then, is a phenomenon of the modern conversion
of art into an aspect of intellectual culture open to all, rather than,
as formerly, a source of delight and of taste-cultivation for an
elite, or an implement of ritual.
It is easy to condemn the predominance of art books over art
works as typical of the breakdown of "organic" experience in our
mass civilization and its replacement by knowledge or by a mere
illusion of it. It is equally easy to acclaim the spread of art publica–
tions as a sign of mounting public understanding and the means of
a general elevation of taste.
Both these interpretations seem somewhat beside the point.
The fact is that art's relation with society has been changed and
thereby the character of art itself, past and present.
. Given the new reality of art as a document, it is futile to apply
the standard of an aristocratic contemplation untroubled by the
questioning mind. On the other hand, wider knowledge of art is
no evidence that art is taking on a larger part in contemporary life,
since experience of art can only come from looking at works and
this leading to engrossment in the particular has more to do, as we
h;we indicated above, with ignorance than with knowledge.
For a sound art education we need to augment our knowledge
through art books and develop our ignorance through works of
art.'
2. Frank Lloyd Wright's recently opened museum on Fifth Avenue has been
criticized on the grounds that its inclined ramp is not conducive to con–
templation. The question of contemplation is also involved in the Mu–
seum
of Modern Art's current drive for twenty-five million dollan to
