LEON BOTSTEI N
271
has now become a consumer success, a fetish of decoration. The art
nouveau and art deco taste of today reflects our desire to cover with
color and intricate designs the ugliness of the reality around us. We
seek, like the Viennese, to render even the mundane "esthetic." Arts
and crafts insulate us from political and social conflict, as they did in
Vienna.
The art of fin-de-siecle Vienna, like its music, is as distant
spiritually from Weimar (Kathe Kollwitz, Georg Grosz, and Max
Beckmann) as are minimal painting and the work of Frank Stella;
the photography of Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan , andJan Groover
is likewise distant from the socially aware work of past masters
Walker Evans, Paul Strand, and Lewis Hine, not to mention
painters Ben Shahn, William Gropper, and Peter Blume or Picasso's
Guernica.
If the apolitical, ahistorical trends and general alienation of
intellectuals from politics and society in the Vienna of 1900 bred a
nonpolitics and a weak socialism, a passion for "art for art's sake"
and a fascination with the private and the psychological, so too can
one see in America an analogy in our obsession with new therapies,
family therapy among them, with personal growth and develop–
ment, private perceptions, and one's own personal odyssey in life.
We are in the midst of a national antimodern effort to render our
lives conventionally pretty and elegant, at ease and comfortable . We
seek to avoid contemplating structural issues and concern ourselves
with cosmetic effects that, with the help of a nostalgic touch, hide
severe difficulties for the moment, which, after all, may be all that is
of interest to us.
The educated middle class of Vienna was absorbed in
Gemut–
lichkeit,
in a drive, as Stefan Zweig put it, for security and respect–
ability.
It
was reacting in part to the politicl and economic disorders
of the 1870s, as we are reacting to comparable difficulties in the late
1960s and the early 1970s. The Viennese bourgeois was driven by a
passion for consuming culture and appearing civilized without
reference to politics or society. Theatre, opera, concerts, poetry, art,
popular presentations of knowledge, and books, especially the
historical novel and the popular biography, flourished. Merely on
the basis of the new, expanded sections in our major newspapers on
the home , culture, and "living," it is apparent that we too are a
nation not of producers of new cultures but of cannibalizers of old
culture, consumers dependent on the expertise of ever more
powerful cultural journalists and critics. Our pessimism about
