A Roomful of Critics

...The new criticism, Battock finds, is qualitatively different from the criticism that has preceded it...

...This apparent peculiarity is very much a part of the new way of looking at art: The position of the curator or director is regarded as equivalent to that of the artists whose work he selects, since he is the creator of the exhibition...

...If one were to take a similar reading, for instance, of Battock's views and his critical survey, one might conclude that there is a good deal of cloudy weather up ahead...

...Freed from our preoccupation with the basic necessities, we will be able to afford the theater, concerts, books, museum catalogues, without batting an eye...

...The state of art criticism at the moment is anything but conducive to the kind of generalizations that Battock feels are worthwhile...

...The New Art is an odd volume...

...The truth is that the latest developments in art appear, all too often, on television and in the pages of Life or Vogue without the sustaining arm of the bona fide critic...

...The oldest piece is a tired little homily on the creative act, delivered by Marcel Duchamp to a convention in Houston, Texas, in 1957...

...It is time, he feels, "to state that art would be a dull and rarefied place without fashion.' Tom Hess' view of the new American vanguard audience is more polemical...

...Critical exercises of this kind are hardly a new way of looking at art...

...It is in the interest of defining that judgment and showing how it relates to, or possibly distorts, what the critic considers to be the values of the artist under review that he takes note of the timing of an exhibition and the official construction placed upon an artist's work...

...I don't know how many monographs each of the 21 critics in this volume has written, but I would be willing to bet that the largest percentage of critical activity revolves around lectures and the occasional essay or review for art journals and periodicals-precisely the material that Battock has gathered for his book...

...Susan Sontag, imported from another discipline, finds the art audience undernourished for lack of the hearty critical fare that exists in the literary field...

...Leo Steinberg's definition of the art public is more circumspect...

...So one cannot quibble with Battock's claim to be up-to-the-minute and full of the latest words...

...When big-time culture comes to Webster Groves, Missouri, the little Midwest college town that now has its own performing arts center and soon will have a resident professional acting company, it is time to stop beating a dead Philistine...

...Lawrence Alloway, on the other hand, appears to see a vast new audience, avid to take possession of art-although in sometimes vulgar or fashionable ways...

...There Battock appears to dismiss the process that Greenberg has outlined as a mere "necessary prerequisite for the literal imagery and integration of hitherto separate artistic media employed by the artist today...

...Gregory Battock, for example, in his introduction to a paperback anthology of recent art criticism (The New Art, E. P. Dutton, 254 pp., $1.75), contends that "the artist of today necessarily alienates most of his potential audience...

...His authors, he claims, are "actively and consciously engaged in the preparation of a new aesthetic...

...Battock's next aperçu leaves one even more aghast: "Another characteristic aspect of the new criticism is revealed in the way its practitioners tend to review group or retrospective exhibitions almost solely in terms of the selectivity displayed by the person responsible for the show, while paying little or no attention to the merit of the individual artworks or artists included...

...More important, he has failed to take advantage of the information they have provided...

...Contemporary critics, by contrast, "show little interest in such relationships because they have already accepted the fact that the traditional distinctions between the various arts are gradually breaking down, and they recognize the need to begin to think in terms of new definitions of the nature and limitations of an art object...

...It never achieves that...

...Thus, while Martin Ries is informing readers at the back of the book that in 1960, Americans "spent more than twice as much on the arts as on recreation, and six times as much as on sports," Battock, up front, is telling them an old, old story about the unwillingness of the public to face up to the challenges of art...

...He goes even further to make the striking claim that "It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the art of our time simply could not exist without the efforts of the critic...

...when new centers for dispensing the balm of painting, sculpture, theater and the dance are sprouting up across the country, following hard on the heels of the shopping centers, we had better believe that the facts of cultural life in the United States have changed radically...

...But in his haste to wrap up a consensus on the present state of culture, he seems to have overlooked some noticeable squabbling among his writers...

...The New Art, then, lacks the critical focus that might have made it a valuable book...

...full of contentious squawks, random praise, critical demurrers and selfjustifications, it is a roomful of critics not always at their best...

...at most, they are a method for determining the cultural climate...

...These forms are directly related to the growing audience for art and it is their proliferation-if not their uniqueness -that document one of the significant trends in contemporary criticism...

...From the introductory note to the essay on "Modernist Painting," one can surmise that Greenberg is somewhat outside the province of Battock's critical theories...

...Fishing in these troubled waters, he has come up with some curious finds...

...He sees it as a functional position, a role into which people-artists, critics, viewers-are "thrust or forced by a given experience.' The plight of this audience, throughout the history of modern art, has been chronic...

...Their flights to this summer's Biennale in Venice have, no doubt, been booked well in advance...

...The monograph, the lengthy essay on an individual artist, he believes, has become the "major vehicle" for contemporary criticism-though, oddly enough, no example of this genre is included in his survey...

...The pressures of defining specific attributes for this new criticism that he finds so very different from the writings of the past has alerted Battock to a number of stunning possibilities...

...It is all too clear from Battock's book that, in trying to locate and define our audience, we are blind men hesitating before a very large elephant...

...That attempt, however, is being thwarted by the Establishment of critics and editors with its "minority humanism" and its standards that act as barriers "to curiosity and generosity...

...It shouldn't be difficult to recognize that in organizing an exhibition, in choosing the works to be shown, a curator is exercising his own critical judgment...

...They are not only diametrically opposed, but actively engaged in taking pot-shots at each other within the covers of the book...

...Cocktails in hand, they can be seen at the latest museum openings...

...The vast majority of the population cannot endure the challenge to conventional value structures and existing social psychology represented by the statements of contemporary artists...

...Yet, the legend of art's alienation from society dies hard...

...Greenberg is evidently in danger of losing his badge as a contemporary critic...

...And if we can credit the latest predictions that in 1975 a bit less than half of our personal incomes will be available for discretionary purposes, then culture is in for an even larger explosion than the one we are currently reading about...

...He could well be consigned to the antediluvian past (somewhere around 1960, no doubt, when Gombrich's Art and Illusion was published), amid all those writers who mistakenly thought that style and philosophy and the relationship of art to the other arts constituted a large part of their critical territory...

...On that issue, the critics have agreed to disagree...

...Present-day Babbitts, in any case, are wearing a different cut of cloth...

...There is, however, a central question toward which a number of the articles gravitate: the nature of today's art public...

...Henry Geldzahler sees two audiences, as it were, a true audience which is small and specialized, made up mostly of professional art historians, and a larger, more democratic audience whose assumption into aesthetic heaven will be long and arduous...

...But how can we...

...Furthermore, recognized critics as well as museum officials are sometimes caught short-as they were with the Pop Art craze-having to take up the critical issues of a style well after its mass-media debut...

...True, it includes some very respectable critics-Clement Greenberg, Leo Steinberg, E. C. Goosen, Dore Ashton, Lucy Lippard-and most of its articles, lectures and catalogue texts date from the '60s...

...It was intended to fill a gap and provide the general survey of modern art criticism that its editor feels is lacking...

...But what new aesthetic togetherness can Tom Hess and Lawrence Alloway be creating...

...Each new innovation has displaced previous values and provoked an anguished response...

...Older writers on art, like E. H. Gombrich, Clive Bell, Kenneth Clark, were primarily concerned with "style, philosophy, and relationships between art and literature and between art and the other arts...

...Where does this place Clement Greenberg, whose contribution to The New Art is a patient analysis of such traditional distinctions, a thorough discussion of the modernist tendency to isolate what is "unique and irreducible" in each of the arts...

...ON ART By James R. Mellow A Roomful of Critics When cities like New York or Milwaukee, which have had difficulties supporting baseball teams, are nonetheless engaged in expensive cultural pursuits with substantial business and civic backing...

...She holds up Sir Herbert Read and admonishes us to raise our level of discourse...

...he sees it as parasitic and fickle, as patronizing the new painting "while attempting to contain and muffle its subversive content...