566
PARTISAN REVIEW
modities has diluted the intelligence of modernism to near-extinction . The
subduing ofart by the cultural environment threatens to reduce painting and
sculpture to aspects of the communications and decorations industries.
Today , the survival of art depends on the capacities of individuals to
recover their initiative against the automatic processes of mass society . In
exploding the dream of stabilized cultural progress, the present financial and
policy crisis among art institutions provides an opportunity to shake off the
ideological and bureaucratic structure built upon the arts in the past fifteen
years.
ROBERT ROSENBLUM
How one compares then and now is certain to reflect problems of
generation and maybe of geriatrics. If anyone under thirty-five were asked to
weigh the dead past against the living present, the answer would not be too
sensible , since the New York art scene of the 1950s is, for the young, as
mythical as that of, say, early twentieth-century Paris or, for real juniors, of
fifteenth-century Florence . On the other hand, for those over thirty-five,
nostalgia and pride may take over and falsely pinpoint a Golden Age of New
York at exactly the moment they first flexed their own youthful muscles. I
suspect, then , that most senior citizens, and even middle-aged ones, will
diagnose a ·sad decline in the high standards they imagine they helped to
create or to recognize .
They will be wrong, of course . The facts of history, which here include
those of the psychology of aging, show us that most art critics and artists
become blind and/or hostile to the art of younger generations . Baudelaire
(
could be passionate about his senior, Delacroix, but then went for Guys
(
instead of Manet ; Ruskin could fervently defend old Turner as well as his
I
contemporaries , the Pre-Raphaelites, but vilified his junior , Whistler ;
Gertrude Stein may have things to tell us about Picasso and Gris , but is beside
the point on anybody who followed her own Cubist generation. (The alert and
flexible Diderot, who promoted his juniors, Greuze and David, is a shining
exception here, as is Barnett Newman, who, unlike most of his painter–
contemporaries, followed ardently and without Olympian condescension , the
innovative art of the young .)
The story of the last twenty-five years bears out these generalizations . We
have all too often watched the hardening of critical arteries, a sour spectacle
that should teach us all that when we don 't understand the young, it is better
to withhold judgment than to attack them with the seemingly timeless values
of our own lost youth. Harold Rosenberg's contempt for almost everything
consequential Gasper Johns belatedly excepted) that postdates his own
