The Artist's Status

...But Pop-Art is already old hat, and so is—almost—Op-Art...

...They hate dealers (always excepting the rare ones who neither force nor prohibit their artists to change style), but cannot do without them: "Even a bad dealer is better than none...

...Here in the America of the 1960s an unusual phenomenon can be observed...

...Most artists are actually plagued with the odd contradiction that they are free and—in a, hundred different ways—unfree at the same time...

...He knows that he is isolated, yet he is also aware of the danger of being removed from his fellowmen...

...He feels that the critic's usurpation of power as taste-maker is too excessive to be really beneficial, yet he dares not antagonize him...

...Messrs...

...Indeed, the researchers apologize, almost with a blush, that their study was not completed before the advent of Pop-Art...

...He does not believe that soaring prices will lead to a greater refinement of aesthetic taste...

...The artist resents the bourgeois for whom collecting is mainly a crass financial speculation, yet he dares not offend him...

...From this book the artist emerges as a split being, living within his society and yet, in certain ways, outside it...

...Through the interviews with these twenty-nine artists, the authors—a sociologist and a psychologist—have presented a composite portrait of today's American artist who, while basically the same kind of man as, say, a Renaissance painter or sculptor, is faced with far different problems...

...Not all of the artists interviewed belong to the avant-garde, and some even display a bitterness about their confreres who "come with a machine gun or Coca Cola bottles...

...He observes that the museum's attitude is basically reportorial, and fears that his own present success may be based on factors that could well corrupt him...

...For today we have a mass culture, with the accompanying art for the masses, and also small groups of afficianados quite unlike the Medici...

...In our affluent society the artist wants to live as comfortably as a bourgeois—without becoming one...

...Nineteen of the informants belong to what is—or rather was—known as Abstract Expressionism...

...Yet in this whirlpool of constant change, nothing appears to be deader than yesterday's Action Painters...

...As I said earlier, this is an informative book, largely because it offers raw material—"informal depth interviews" —which could have been shaped into a shorter, more readable book by condensing the statements and eliminating repetitions, triteness, and an excess of "informality...

...This dangerous cult of novelty results in the showing of a new art for every new season...

...And who constitutes the "vanguard...

...A more precise one might be "The Successful Artist in New York...

...Thus, the artist has remained an outsider in a society which has more collectors, more museums than any known earlier society...

...For them, artists have remained the "bearers of special goods" whose anguish is undiminished by advantages already available in the initial stage of what is expected to turn into the "great society...

...Rosenberg and Fliegel do not seem to share this fear...

...The other side of the coin is the unprecedented tendency to create new things, new styles for the sake of newness, with the museums acting as purveyors of novelty...

...The authors know that some metaphysical suffering is a necessary condition of a man's being an artist, and that his very sensitivity makes an artist different from other citizens...

...today it is the vanguard artists who are highly successful, and the conservatives who suffer...

...In the France of the Impressionists only the academicians, whose names are now forgotten, earned enough money, while Monet and his associates were starving...

...There is hardly any reference to the status and attitudes of artists elsewhere in the United States, or Europe, or Latin America...

...Reviewed by Alfred Werner Half of this informative book con-sists of statements made by deliberately unidentified artists, selected from the fifty best established and most successful in Manhattan, and of excerpts from the writings of critics and of psychoanalysts...

...A British critic, whom the authors quote, maintains that the modern artist has, for a variety of reasons, relinquished his role as a rebel and outsider, that he no longer is a protester, and that the time is near when the artist, becoming more and more a conformist, will be indistinguishable from the rest of the community...

...Under such circumstances, one wonders what their conclusions would have been had their study been continued into this period of accelerated change...

...The title—The Vanguard Artist—is not quite accurate...