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the attitudes of these artists and the reason for their prompt acceptance
by the art world when he said, "The American artist has an audience,
and there exists a machinery-dealers, critics, museums, collectors–
to keep things moving. . . . Yet there persists a nostalgia for the good
old days when the artist was alienated, misunderstood, unpatronized."
But I doubt that nostalgia is at issue here. What we have instead
is a school of artists who propose to show us just how nice everything
is after all. A critical examination of ourselves and the world we inhabit
is
no longer hip: let us, rather, rejoice in the Great American Dream.
The striking abundance of food offered us by this art is suggestive.
Pies, ice cream sodas, coke, hamburgers, roast beef, canned soups---often
triple life size-would seem to cater to infantile personalities capable
only of ingesting, not of digesting nor of interpreting. Moreover, the
blatant Americanism of the subject matter-packaged foods, flags, juke
boxes, slot machines, Sunday comics, mammiferous nudes-may be seen
as
a willful regression to parochial sources just when American painting
had at last entered the mainstream of world art.
Only in the Pop Artist's choice of subject matter is there an implicit
taking of sides. Essentially he plays it cool. He makes no commitments;
for a commitment in either love or anger might mean risking something.
Aline Saarinen in the April issue of
Vogue
(such magazines are an
important part of the machinery that creates art-fashion) aptly says of
Warhol: "He seems to love everything and love it equally.... I suspect
that he feels not love but complacency and that he sees not with
pleasure or disgust but with acquiescence."
What is so objectionable about Pop Art is this extraordinary relaxa–
tion of effort, which implies further a profound cowardice. It is the
limpness and fearfulness of people who cannot come
to
grips with the
times they live in. The Abstract Expressionists dedicated their lives to
art and made a point of doing so. And who could have been more
committed than Caravaggio, Chardin, and Courbet? But the Pop
painters, because of their lack of stance, their lack of involvement,
are producing works that strike the uninfatuated viewer as slick, effete,
and chic. They share with all academic art-including, by the way,
Nazi and Soviet art-the refusal to question their complacent acquies–
cence to the values of the culture. And most ironic of all is the fact
that this art of abject conformity, this extension of Madison Avenue, is
presented as
avant garde.
In his brief introduction to the catalog of the Recent Acquisitions
for Brandeis University, Sam Hunter suggests that Pop Art uses many
of the compositional devices of the "purer expressions of our times."
