52
HAROLD ROSENBERG
everything when their handicraftsmen went into the factories and the
ideologues who became disillusioned when the workingmen ceased to be
an object of commiseration, my interests put me on the side of equality
and of plenty of free time for all, such as cultures based on the crafts
could not allow. As to art, the masterpieces of modem music, painting,
literature are not to my mind mere shadow images of a megalopolitan
spiritual desert.
Still, some kind of deterioration in the quality of people, their be–
havior and their products does seem to be taking place. This may be an
effect of transition. Yet bureaucracy is growing and the arts are by no
means immune to it. The man who handles and shapes the materials,
be they leather or steel, or words, paint, or sounds, has less and less
control over the use to which his product is put, including its intellectual
use. The artist is isolated from his public by the very processes and
institutions through which his work is brought before it. The larger the
influence exerted by his work the less that influence communicates the
idea or sense of things embodied in the work itself.
All we have on the positive side is the individual's capacity for
resistance. Resistance and criticism. Most modern masterpieces are critical
masterpieces. Joyce's writing is a criticism of literature, Pound's poetry a
criticism of poetry, Picasso's painting a criticism of painting. This art also
criticizes the existing culture.
Because it lives through criticism, modern art cannot be used as an
argument to prove the case in favor of modern times and modern man.
Like the art of all periods, it has the characteristics, including the
negative characteristics, of the culture in which it was created. One who
hates the modem world will find its most odious qualities mirrored in
Joyce or Picasso, and will see only disintegration, distortion and the
absence of form and nobility.
In sum, vis-a-vi!! the past, the future and its creations are, to say the
least, in question. When labor is no longer needed, or when its character
as machine-tending has reached its ultimate-for example, when work
consists of watching lights flash on and off and pressing a button when
something goes wrong-when the use of skill in production is no longer
even a rarity, changes in mankind of the profoundest magnitude may be
postulated. All relations between man and nature, as well as between
the individual and himself, will be transformed in unimaginable ways.
Whether one considers this to be the bottommost point of human history
or its height, one thing is certain: that the values of the future, including
its esthetic values, are all in the making. We may be headed toward a
society of dehumanized robots or toward a community of intellectual
