Art at the Margin

...Lastly, scientific cleaning...

...The same thing...

...Artists themselves, along with art historians, have capitulated to science, or to pseudo-science, and commerce has glutted us with reproductions that have encouraged easy acceptance...

...Behind Wind's conservatism is a radical, if not impious, daring that invites misunderstanding...

...and not from an Impressionist distance...

...and a marginal experience is not disturbing...

...Wind is concerned with the difference between quality and quantity...

...Wind does not trust iconographical studies either...

...Wind takes this "cultural" familiarity as a diffusion: "To say that a diffused experience becomes more dense if it is divided by the number of persons who share it, is like claiming that if more people drink diluted milk, there is less dilution...

...The theme of these lectures is our immunity to art, an immunity which, in general...

...One can readily dispute Wind's thesis that art is now marginal, for it is probably more popular than at any time since the Renaissance...

...Wind is obviously a conservative...

...It is hard to say which is more important, but one had better be prepared to read these notes, which actually are little essays containing a succession of judgments that are almost axiomatically phrased...

...But one had better review his facts carefully before attempting to refute Wind, since the modest and enormous display of learning revealed both in the lectures and their sustaining notes is no rash outburst of petulance against modern art or art criticism...

...Both have made art peripheral...

...connoisseurs and art historians have fragmented our vision of works of art...

...Art history, with its concern for stylistics, has often been a form of connoisseurship when it has not been solely concerned with iconography...

...the cult of the fragment dominates 19th-century literature as well as 19th-century painting...

...In a passage that has already been thought profane...

...mechanical reproductions, restoration and cleaning have falsified art-objects...

...Wind appraises this feat of commerce by remarking that "it is not the number of persons who look at art that is alarming, it is the number of works of art they look at, and the reduction of art to a passing show...

...Wind attributes to two associated forces—science and commerce...

...the disappearance of the patron, who has been replaced by the dealer, has left the artist with nobody to struggle against—and art has always been a contest in which the will of the artist confronted the will of the public in one or another guise...

...Herbert Read implied something of this sort in his title...

...Margaret Mead wrote of the dilution of artistic experience that attends reproductions, and André Malraux has assumed that we live in a museum without walls...

...But his is not the dogmatic reaction of an historian-csthctician like Hans Sedlmayr, or of those who revere the past merely because it is past...

...In 1960, for example...

...the painter who tries to accommodate science to his work is prone to choose those aspects of science that are most "advanced" and thus merely fashionable...

...In fact, none of Wind's arguments is new...

...But it is much harder to disagree with Wind's reasons for his thesis, since each of his lectures examines a mode of dilution or debasement of artistic experience...

...He identifies the chief reasons for our devaluation of art as follows: the appreciation of art has become so convenient that art has now lost its "sting...

...Thus our encounter with art is tranquillizing, and the mithridatic side-effects are inevitable...

...Constable intended his paintings to be seen close to...

...To Hell With Culture...

...The parts of this book are greater than the whole...

...One might add that the coy and tentative note in T. S. Eliot is implicit in a title like Notes Towards the Definition of Culture...

...Wind, of course, dismisses Malraux—not quite so contemptuously as the French critic Georges Duthuit did some years ago (as being the "dervish of the kiosks"), but rather as the custodian of a "paper-world of art...

...Thus the sketch, the expressive execution of a hand or ear, the unfailing index of brushing this or that seems more authentic than the total structure...

...A less evident devaluing has been due to connoisseurship, which is the faculty for interpreting a work of art by fragmenting it, "whittling down a picture almost to its vanishing point" in order to find in it the authenticating detail, the singular "touch" in a minor passage...

...Ultimately...

...This latter point was made some time ago by Jean Cassou in an essay on the artist's nostalgia for a métier...

...Reviewed by WYLIE SYPHER Author, "Four Stages of Renaissance Style," "Baroque to Cubism" The best books are often small books, and Art and Anarchy is really two small books—the text of Edgar Wind's six Reith Lectures broadcast over the BBC and the collection of notes which he has appended to them for publication...

...The best thing one can say about this frank little book is that it irritates and is, consequently, debatable...

...the artist himself, thanks perhaps to the dominion of science, has willfully withdrawn into an alien world of "pure" esthetic values, leaving the scientist to deal with realities...

...Wind has based his case on the strongest of humane positions: namely, that art is one of the most ambiguous of human activities, requiring a double consciousness—a sense of what is actual and a sense of what is feigned, a sense of participation and a sense of the fictitious...

...Wind observes, has "fractured" poetry: hence Mallarmé's Divagations, Valéry's Fragments du Narcisse and Fragments de poésie brute...

...Like Blake, Wind insists that art is not authentic unless it disturbs...

...Wind is a conservative who finds that modern art encourages facile responses simply because the centrifugal impulses within and around it produce a certain anarchy...

...Wind suggests, can leave a painting in the state of a "specimen" or an "artificial ruin...

...Wind accuses so revered a scholar as Heinrich Woelfflin of this fragmenting, since Woelfflin found the meaning of gothic as decisively written in the "esthetic purism" of a mediaeval shoe as in a cathedral...

...The only authentic artistic experience is perturbing, and there is no doubt that we have been lulled by our science, by our abundant and efficient culture, into believing that we can evade the risk in this experience and neutralize its demands...

...Wind ventures to treat painters like Picasso and Van Gogh as being fatally adaptable to the techniques of reproduction that have spread familiarity with art over whole layers of our culture...

...Picasso's "destructions" fail whenever he presents, as in Guernica, what is already destroyed...

...the overestimation of Jungian depth psychology has led the artist to suppose, quite wrongly, that the archaic stuff of the subconscious is more valuable artistically than it actually is...

...it paradoxically assimilates itself to another medium...

...we have wrong-headedly assumed that knowledge obstructs our responses to art...

...Wind accuses us of making art another opiate...

...For example: whenever a medium becomes absolutely "pure...

...here again, the demand for "freshness" results in falsification...

...Though he pleads for knowledge about a work, he knows well enough that iconographical readings (like his own) are fruitful only if they make us experience the painting in a new way...

...These centrifugal impulses have expelled art toward the margin of our experience...