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PARTISAN REVIEW
witless credulity and self-deception. Through the flash and filigree ofWolfe 's
orchestration of this theme, one hears the throb of that
basso ostinato
by
which he repeats: there isn't any experience; there isn ' t any experience .
Now, if one is looking at the kind of social and economic fallout that
surrounds the making of high art in our culture (and some of it is very noxious
indeed) but one is looking at it from the vantage of having experienced the
seriousness of that art, the situation becomes a little more complicated than
Wolfe wants to allow.
It
becomes, one might want to say , morally complex .
But if what informs one's perspective is the absence of any experience of that
work, then the moral issues begin to shift ground.
From the position from which Wolfe writes, a position informed by his
own professed lack of aesthetic experience of this work , there is no central
intuitive response for which one has to take any particular responsibility and ,
therefore, no brake on what one might say . Wolfe feels free to describe the art
in just about any way he chooses . Pop art, we are told, was a realistic style all
along and held out the pre-cubist pleasures of narrative painting, a point one
finds quite baffling in a text illustrated withJasperJohn's deadpan
American
Flag
and Roy Lichtenstein 's
Yellow and Blue Brushstrokes,
neither of which
function narratively. Larry Poons's painting can be likened to the optical
illusions from "Ripley's 'Believe
It
or Not' "; Frank Stella 's work can be
described as frames hung on the wall with nothing in the middle; and
minimalist sculpture can be characterized as room dividers.
That is how art gets treated; the vulgar cannibalizing Wolfe performs on
the body of art criticism is done with even greater insouciance. Given his
contention that there is no experience, it is possible for him to describe the
men and ,women who write about modernist art as a monolithic cult, per–
forming the ritual of self-promoting obscurantism out of uniformly con–
temptible motives .
It
is possible for Wolfe to ignore, in the case of the three
critics he parodies at greatest length , the fact that Harold Rosenberg , Clement
Greenberg, and Leo Steinberg are men whose response to works ofart have led
them to conceive of the project of writing about those responses in ways that
are entirely diverse . Rosenberg, who works in an area between art criticism and
social history, uses the possibility of an authentic experience of art as a model
for authenticity in general, and has been consistently attentive to the dangers
of alienation from experience . Greenberg, with an entirely different focus ,
has engaged in a long and patient labor
to
build a normative criticism based
on a language ofdescription in which what one says about a work is completely
verifiable within the manifest features of the object itself. And Steinberg has
wished to codify what might be called a psychology of response : a written
enactment of the process of careful and sustained attention to works of art.
But if these three critical tasks are different, their motivating energies are not .
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