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PARTISAN REVIEW
that "Murray will combine some of Gris' shadowed layering of form
with Arp's biomorphism in Suprematist deep space and serve it all
up with more than a touch of Disney on a scale that is confidently
Abstract Expressionist.» Smith's failure to see contradictions in this
recipe, and her inability to find anything wrong with interpreting
Gris via Disney, suggests a larger failure in critical attitude. This at–
titude, now epidemic in the art world, regards art history as a
smorgasbord of styles, without formal and cultural substance and
without logical constraints, and dismisses distinctions between high
and low as if these were simply arbitrary and socially imposed pre–
judices instead of profoundly different domains of feeling and in–
telligence. The badness of Murray's art has everything to do with the
false claims that have been made for it, and with the deadly ease
with which it plays to the self-deluding philistinism of the art world
at present. Of course, that Murray's too-easily satisfied audience
fails to ask more of her work is ultimately beside the point; that Mur–
ray herself doesn't has been fatal.
Coming in
Partisan Review
• Natan Sharansky on Being Free
• Eugene Ionesco on the Theater of the Absurd
• Raymond Aron:
A Memoir
• Edith Kurzweil: Psychoanalysis in Vienna
• Lionel Abel:
The Hero
oj
Metatheater
• William Phillips:
The Function of Criticism Today
• David Bar-Illan:
Israeli Letter
• Nathan Glazer on Life in the Bronx
• Jules Olitski:
My First New York Show
• Paul Hollander on Fellow Travellers
• Sonya Rudikoff on Virginia Woolf
