Harold Rosenberg
ART AND WORK
The prospect for the arts is bound up of course with the
direction of the culture as a whole. There are many people who have a
rather rosy picture of America's artistic future. In contrast to such an
outlook, there is an opinion, apparently growing in strength, that the way
things are going the arts have
no
future. We live, we are being told
constantly, in a scientific and technological civilization which is syste–
matically reducing man to the most primitive appetites and functions.
Cultural decline used to be the theme of European romanticists and
Americans visiting the great Renaissance cathedrals. Since the war,
novelists, playwrights, thinkers, both here and abroad, have been com–
peting with one another in finding the absolute symbol with which to
represent the nonentity of the modern person. He has been dramatized
as rubbish in a trash can-and as a volunteer rhinoceros. Philosophers
have written volumes on loss of the self, and when committed by modern
man even the most unspeakable crimes have been held to be "banal."
An element in this mood has no doubt been the memory of the
Nazi death camps and the threat of nuclear war. But the dark prophecy
of the fall into subhumanity antecedes Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Indeed
it is customary to see these atrocities as effects of the current human
condition rather than as its initiators. The true source of the man-made
disasters of the twentieth century lies, the philosophers of fall inform us,
in what the advance of technology has done to man himself. This is
another way of saying that the so-called decline of man has to do with
the subject of this Congress*-that is to say, with the crafts. To many
of the critics of contemporary civilization the practice of the crafts is the
*
EDITOR' S NOTE :
"Art and Work" is an expanded version of a talk Mr.
Rosenberg gave, entitled "Vistas in the Arts," at a session of The First World
Congress of Craftsman (1964).
