THEN AND NOW
559
licized auction in history , promoted by big ads and articles in the art and
general media. Two years later, Marlborough Incorporated , international
art
galleries , opened a branch in New York, luring a roster of first-rank artists
from other galleries by blandishments both aboveboard and illegal (again I
opt for vagueness) . Also that year, Kennedy died; in the next few years, as
sculptor George Segal/las observed, "moral sense was suspended ." The
course of art ran on, through a series of reiterative ; derivative , but vivid and
technically accomplished styles, like the popping open of many pods. (' 'I am
a machine ," said Andy Warhol.)
Relationships between the arts and the world during the ensuing
Johnson and Nixon eras has yet to be studied : the theme is the relationship
between political imperialism and a Roman degree of
art
expansion at home .
Comparatively large public tax monies were made available for the first time
since the WPA (with signal differences in economic principle and aesthetic
result) , leading to an explosion of expensive, tax-deductible public architec–
ture and art (some of it as redundant as the new $7 million Lehman wing at the
Metropolitan Museum , or the forthcoming $5.5 million glass shed there, to
" preserve" the Temple ofDendur) . Feedback then conditioned the very look
of the art of the late sixties and seventies : big, bold, flat, not for reasons of the
"Word ," or art historical tradition
(pace
both Greenberg and Wolfe), but to
look good . Stark, flat, simplistic compositions fit well in corporate
headquarter lobbies and on the wide , tall walls of museums for which they
were deliberately made; also , colossal , naked , or primary-colored steel sculp–
tures suggesting Paul Bunyanish male power (albeit well forged and finished),
were fit for bank and office building plazas .
While producing a handsome, vigorous, extroverted style , laissez-faire
art capitalism has also, however, led to a contemptible scene of runaway
prices : In less than twelve months between 1969 and 1970, David Smith's
sculpture
Becca
went up 150%
to
$250 ,000 and was then bought by the Met,
simultaneously increasing pressure from the museum for public assistance.
While the art museum has now been turned into a substitute for church,
circus , and open-air esplanade as a meeting place for the leisured , many
museums have at the same time instituted fees, shutting off access to the poor
and culturally alienated , for whom , in reality , these monuments of capitalist
evangelicalismwere set up in the late nineteenth century (the Met was free to
all comers by agreement with the city of New York from 1878 until 1970) .
With New York near bankruptcy, the Mayor has now set up a permanent
Cultural Commission to oversee funding of all cultural institutions , which, it
is now recognized , generate some $3 billion a year for the city .
Two failures of art in our time could be mentioned : one aesthetic, one
social . A hoped-for union of the arts (foreshadowed in Paris around 1915 and
