THEN AND NOW
567
abstract-expressionist generation is the classic case here; but so is the way that
Clement Greenberg's absolutism, at times so heroic and illuminating in the
late forties and fifties, has become totally historical and irrelevant to all but his
robot apostles, who, in their carbon-copying of an ancient master plan, seem
to have been born old. In their growing distance from the present, such critics
illuminate problems ofgeneration warp and psychology more than helping us
to see new, unfamiliar art, which can only become accessible by a sympathetic
approach to individual works and artists. Criticism born of hostility and
incomprehension resorts to windmill tilting: put-downs of entire categories
(all pop art or all minimal art or all conceptual art is bad), sociological exposes,
aesthetic theorizing that determines by principle, not experience, what has to
be major or minor art. It deals, that is, with any issue but the specifics of the
new art itself, which always remains invisible, generalized, or caricatured in
these assaults.
This all too common brand ofcritical atrophy was recently exemplified in
these pages
(Partisan Review,
1974, no. 4) by Barbara
Rose's
vituperative
attack on the
Museum
of Modern Art's
Eight Contemporary Artists
show.
Disliking or not understanding the art, she ignored it (the eight artists were
identified only in a footnote listing and went largely unmentioned in the text)
and chose instead exactly that kind of jeering polemic (behold corruption, the
collapse of standards, sick personality cults, and so on) which, ironically, she
in turn was so right to attack in her later review ofTomWolfe's
Painted Word.
Wolfe's garbled, mocking efforts to expose fraud and folly should serve as a
warning. When critics, even formerly responsible and compassionate ones,
begin to find contemporary art vacant, trivial, or conspiratorial and then long
for some hazy Arcadia (when art, they think, had quality and critics and
dealers, integrity), they join Wolfe's philistine ranks.
But happily, younger art of the sixties and seventies need not threaten all
older spectators. There are enough first-rate critical responses among them, as
of course among the young, to make one believe in progress since the forties
and fifties. I am not referring to the disastrous wave of high methodological
seriousness which weighed down the pages of
Art/arum
in the sixties, when
Greenberg disciples and equally formalist
counter~disciples
developed
thought and prose of such inscrutable greyness that they could make even
Jules Olitski's gorgeous paint expanses look more like illustrations to Witt–
genstein than like peach down and perfumed mist. I am thinking rather of the
healthy fusion in the last decade of the techniques of art history and art crit–
icistn, whether in terms of Leo Steinberg's finely honed yet pungent blend of
enormous historical erudition , intensely personal perception, and Naboko–
vian prose, or of Lawrence Alloway's ability
to
present tough new art (for
example, Sol Lewitt's) with the lucidity of an historian accurately analyzing
