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PARTISAN REVIEW
by the Living Theater here in the early 1950s) petered out , and an alienation
of the arts and artists from one another took place, partly through rivalry for
funds and partly through mutual irritation with the extremist polemics many
have indulged in for the news-eager media.
Graver, and symbolic of a larger failure of American society today, is the
failure to invent, nurture, and stand by an effective,Program of populist art
education, a movement begun by progressive art educators of the 1930s and
1940s, now cynically abandoned by many museums for its lack of publicity
value and because, in these politicized times, the job seems too complicated .
JULES OLiTSKI
I was not at all on the scene in the forties and barely, if at all, in
the late flfties . I don't really feel on the scene today either. Concerning
present taste and sensibility, I am bemused by collectors and museum people
who dote equally, at one and the same time, upon their David Smith
and
their
George Segal, upon their Kenneth Noland
and
their James Rosenquist ,
upon their Anthony Caro
and
their Alexander Calder. When did it begin?
Did the few collectors twenty or thirty years ago of Pollock and Still also go for
Ben Shahn and Corbino? In the later nineteenth century the collectors and
critics who went for Monet and Pissarro didn't go for Bougereau and
Meissonier too . (This easy acceptance in our time of high art alongside lesser or
even meritricious art was flrst brought to my attention by Clement Greenberg
in a talk he gave at Bennington College eight or nine years ago.)
Attitude toward money? Maybe what 's new is the expectation of artists
that real money is to be made in the making and the selling of art . Art dealers
are quite properly out to make a proflt . I doubt there has been any change in
their area. An art market of one sort or another has existed for at least several
centuries , which certainly hasn 't prevented great art from being made , or
great artists from practicing their art. Artists always hope that one day they
will flnd their Kahnweiler. But the sad truth is there are no Kahnweilers. Even
Kahnweiler wasn't Kahnweiler, at least not as he has been pictured in retro–
spect. Money in itself doesn't corrupt. One has to be accessible to corruption.
Money can be a help, especially when you have a family. That ought to be
obvious.
As to the kind of painting and sculpture being done, I don't think a time
that has produced aNoland , a Caro, among at least an armful of both younger
and older artists , has anything to be apologetic for.
I suppose one enormous difference , maybe unique to recent times, is the
emergence of artists in their twenties and early thirties (there may even be
some in their teens , though I don 't know any), who are given major shows in
