ART AND WORK
53
Supermen. But whatever be the outcome, the arts cannot be expected
to carry on as they did before the industrial age. And even works
produced in earlier epochs are bound to appear in a state of alteration
and serve different functions from those they did in their own time.
A situation so drastic will, naturally, tend to generate extreme ideas.
Given the forecast of Everyman as an utterly passive consumer inhabiting
a vast supermarket that fills up automatically each morning with syn–
thetic goodies, it is not absurd to retort with the prophecy of Everyman
as creative artist. The effect of universal automation must be to make
geniuses of us all-as an alternative to converting us into amoeba-like
digestive apparatuses. There is evidence, of course, that both conditions
are in the process of being realized-which means, of course, that neither
can
be.
For the purpose of this discussion, I shall therefore assume that
history will continue to behave like history; that is, that it will bring
forth everything except what is logically expected of it. With history as
history, the vista consists of a mixup of the new and the old, of the
outworn, the revived and the original. Thus the development of art in the
decades to come will tend to parallel the three major phases of production
in
general: the crafts, scientific technology, free creation (including
im–
provisation, games, totems) . I shall comment on these briefly in relation
to art today.
In much of contemporary pamtmg and sculpture, art retains its
ancient tie with the crafts. Reacting against machine-produced copies of
things, art functions as a workshop for fashioning handmade ornaments
and pushing forward possibilities in design. In this approach the fine
artist and the inventive craftsman are indistinguishable from each other.
It is regrettable that an inherited hierarchy of terms makes it more
desirable to be called an artist than an artisan-for instance, much of the
fuss about Pop art has been due to the ignorance among critics and
curators of what is being done in advertising and in the display industry.
For an art historian to justify his admiration for Lichtenstein by praising
the latter's draughtsmanship is laughable-as if the art departments of
Madison Avenue and Hollywood were not full of the prize students of
America's art academies. (To appreciate Lichtenstein's contribution to
the art gag is something else.) That the painter or sculptor creates a
single object rather than a model for machine production is not in itself
sufficient to distinguish his work from that of the designer-craftsman
in
the automobile or space industry or in "the communications." The
enormous improvement in techniques of reproduction in art further
