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PARTISAN REVIEW
who have' 'successfully adjusted themselves to their environment,
"
the piece,
at the time, was a diatn'be mainly against Reinhardt's contemporan'es
who~,
he confided to me, he could never forgive because he felt
they
should know
better, Conceiveddun'ng the waning years of ' 'action painting,
"
the talk had
a pun'tanical, moralizing tone that was unfashionable at a moment when
Amen'can art was just beginning to be joyously celebrated, Today , Rein–
hardt 's concern regarding the decline ofethical standards seems a prophetic
view into the seventies. His fear that art would be invaded by anti-art, and
adulterated by a confusion with Itfe and its activities, appears entirely
validated, His appeal to a reform movement that would re-establish values
seems especially apposite at this moment when many members of the art
community are beginning to be justifiably concerned with such matters,
The following unpublishedmanuscn'pt is from
Art-as-Art: The Selected
Writings of Ad Reinhardt,
which I edited for Viking Press as one of the
Documents ofModern Art, a sen'es Reinhardt onginally started, with Robert
MotherwellandpublisherGeorge Wittenborn, to disseminate the wn'tings of
the modern European artists in Amen'ca.
-Barbara Rose
A general ungentlemanly agreement that "artists should not
talk" prevents artists from twinging each others' consciences nowadays, A
popular myth that' 'the dirty work" takes place only outside the artist's studio
and not in his own mind , also helps ease the artist's burden and helps make
his shame a little more shameless. But if the art world is' 'a sink of corruption
and crime" that the poor struggling artist never made , who did?
Attists may well' 'no wonder" why, as a decade and a half of expression–
ist debauchery and neo-surrealist delinquency draws to an end; words like
"conscience," "ethics," "morality , " "guilt," and "corruption," creep into
artists' conversations with increasing frequency.
What is' 'the Failure of Art-Conscience" at present? How is our time out
of joint these days? Do we have a history ofart morality? A moral art history? Is
there a code of art ethics? What are the uhconscionable crimes of artists?
Is the art "sink of corruption" like any other ordinary sink? Can it be
condoned with' 'that's life" or "to err is human" or "even the air we breathe
in is polluted"? The everyday world has Law, Order, Justice, fines, fit punish–
ments, and a Commissioner of Air Pollution. Everything all together may be
beyond good and evil, right and wrong, but art is not .
