40
PARTISAN REVIEW
Taylor, in his recent
The Fine Arts in America,
from referring to the
"intense concern for content, not method, that characterized" the
"procedure:;" of the Abstract Expressionists. This is also what comes of
taking artists at their word.)
Some critics would also do well to consult a dictionary oftener.
They might look up the word
gestural,
for example, and discover what
a solecism they commit when they talk of
gestural
painting. Is it
conceivable for a painting to be made by means of gestures? Can a
material object-or for that matter, a poem or a song-be created,
fashioned, or altered by gestures?
It "signifies" that the appelation
art critic
has been narrowed
down now to one who criticizes contemporary and recent art alone.
When you deal with art further back in time you get to be called an art
historian rather than an art critic.
It
was not always that way; it wasn't
that way for Julius Meier-Graefe, or Roger Fry, or Andre Lhote, all
three of whom wrote about past and present indiscriminately, and it
was only ignorance that called anyone of them art historian. Now it's
also become assumed that an art historian proper is not to engage in
criticism, not
to
express value judgments, but keep to scholarship and
interpretation. As a consequence, painting and sculpture of the more
than recent past get less and less evaluated or reevaluated, less and less
criticized as
art.
There are exceptions, but that's just what they are:
exceptions.
The case doesn 't appear to be the same with music. There the
productions of the past continue day in and day out to be evaluated and
reevaluated along with those of the present, and to a great extent by the
same people, whether musicologists or just plain music critics. Nor is
the situation that much the same in literature either, despite all the
truth there is in what E.D. Hirsch says. Literature of the past still does
get discussed often enough in terms of aesthetic value. And while most
literary scholars proper may not come near contemporary or very recent
literature, .literary critics still range between past and present with their
value judgments, and do so as a matter of course, taking it for granted
that without keeping an eye on the past it would be impossible to keep
Taste sharp enough for the present. Of course there are exceptions here,
but these are mainly reviewers, not literary critics proper, and not taken
seriously-as, alas, their counterparts in the field of art are.
The difference for current art writing stems, I feel, from what's
become the entrenched assumption that modern, modernist painting
and sculpture have broken with the past more radically and abruptly
