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Books 339 Blume’s painting of Mussolini in the Roman Forum, executed in the 1930’s, merging political art and Surrealism. His description of No-art as the last aspect of the making of art objects before ‘actional humanism’ (meaning sociocultural happenings) is not accurate; the ‘Doom Show’ of 1962, held in New York City and in Rome, was a manifestation that attracted several thousand people and as ‘actional’ as anything presented later. Is it honest for humanist artists to represent themselvesas being above moral reproach and as automatically part of the ‘good‘side? Are artists such as Ed Kienholz aware of their own shortcomings? A scene of the brutal castration of a Black in the south of the USA. is shown to audiences in the north, or perhaps even more successfully in Europe, where many feel righteous when criticizing the U S A . Jean Toche summed up the behavior of some artists with his electric sign in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum that read: ‘We Are All Prostitutes’. Schwartz avoids an economic analysis of the ‘free market’ in works of art and the esthetiocultural implications. Yet, the market is thesenter of gravity of widely known contemporary art production. For it is only a handful of individuals (‘culturati’,as Tom Wolfe calls them in his book ThePainted Word (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975) ) who determine which art is widely publicized and which is not. But even in the Renaissance, artists were employed to glorify the status quo (cf. J. Gimpel, Contre I’art et les artistes (Paris: Editions du Soleil, 1968)). Only a fewisolated individuals at dramatic stages of their careers (Goya, Rembrandt) seem to have escaped this problem-also movements such as Dada and Surrealism, and then only until the market took an interest in them. Schwartz pays homage to some market-promoted artists, but he balances them by his choice of many of those who are little known. He has an innocent way of cutting through the maze of art works. Formal considerations and stylistic divergencies are disregarded. Art periods, usually treated chronologically and grouped for easier identification and promotion, are happily disregarded, for, indeed, he is not offering anything but his sincere views. In the flood of sterile art-market books, his stands out as one that will make the reader stop and think. Pictures as Arguments. Hans Hess. Sussex University Press, London, 1975. 160 pp., illus. Paper, E2.50. Reviewed by NicholasOrsini* This book looks at modern art froma socio-historical point of view. The author concerns himself with two basic themes that he intertwines: (a) the progressive alternation from a perceptual to a conceptual view of reality and (b) the historical erosion in the artist’s social position, from a position of centralized ideological narration to one of removal from society. Hess sees this conceptualization of reality and the withdrawal of the artist to the fringes of social concern as effect and cause. Pictorial autonomy becomes the artist’s gesture in the face of social ostracism and neglect. Subsequent chapters deal with the various directions taken, the differentguises artists undertook to achieve ‘self-realization’. The author interprets these movements in a provocative and philosophical manner. Hess illuminates other themes along the way, equally fascinating and deviant (and not to be found in art history surveys),over which I would have hoped that he might have lingered longer; some deal with problems that modem art has bequeathed us. ‘Objectivity’ is a shaky word at the best of times. It could with some semblance of truth be used at times when artist and public agreed on a canon of perfection; then an artist could be measured on reaching, surpassing, or failing to reach this standard of perfection; he could be seen to have been objectivelygood. We now live in a situation for which modern art historians have chosen the term ‘nonnormative ’ aesthetics taking the artist’s work at his own *50 Barbara Lane, Hamden, CT 06518, U.S.A. evaluation. He faces this issue squarely when he says that ‘we are thus confronted with a game in which the rules as well as the scoring are arbitrary and if we think that we can...

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