Avant-Garde Art ed. by T. Hess and J. Ashbery (review)

76 Books at this point, the aesthetician might have confronted some new question of philosophical interest, such as: what are the priorities of different kinds of technical facilities?Tintoretto, Rembrandt and Delacroix are sometimes guilty of careless foreshortening (as opposed to deliberate distortion), while Poussin, Caravaggio and Gerome rarely are. Is the ability to achieve harmonious designs the loftiest skill? Or is a forceful imagination the highest aptitude? Or is there something else that is decisive? One will not find out from Isenberg. Does an extension of his thought into these matters presuppose technical knowledge greater than he had? No. But lsenberg does not seem to have been particularly venturesome . His forte lay, rather, in correcting maps charted by less circumspect. more courageous pioneers. This makes it all the more annoying when lsenberg asserts his opinion as though it were guaranteed of some safe perpetuity where none is warranted. Still, the collection is very niuch worth the reading. Typical of philosophical treatments of the arts, it is heavily literary in its emphases. But the author is usually interesting and frequently provocative. Although he was not a thinker of high order, he was an exceedingly careful and thorough one and his revelations of sciolisms, non-sequiturs and wholly ephemeral desiderata are delightful and handy to know about. The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience. Harold Rosenberg. Collier-Macniillan, London and New York, 1973. 272 pp., illus. Paper, €1.50: $2.95. Concerning Contemporary Art: The Power Lectures 1968-1973. Bernard Smith, ed. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975. 185 pp.. illus. Paper, €2.65. Reviewed by Bernard Myers* If the aims of industrialists were to invent hitherto nonexistent artificial desires and then to establish a monopoly in the means of satisfying those needs at the maximum price, industrialists would. quite understandably, be denounced. Yet this is a fair description of what an artist does. His work does not exist until he makes it, by its existence he hopes that i t will provoke demand, then he alone satisfies that demand. 1 have the feeling ( I wish that I could make a more affirmative statement) that this is what Harold Rosenberg has been saying for a long time. He, however, neglects the causes for describing symptoms. Artists are in a predicament in 'free' market societies. Contrary to popular belief. artists are not swindlers by choice. The competitive nature of the 'free' market forces artists both to produce and to sell works and dealers generally expect a work to sell itself. In the past. the patron not only used to commission a work in advance but. by setting the subject, would also assume moral responsibility for the work. What he required was that the artist deliver the goods like any other tradesman. Today artists have to accept or reject that moral responsibiiity on top of all their other problems. No wonder that it is too much for most and that extreme forms of behaviour frequently result from such pressures. This anxiety rubs o f on the object and is passed on by contagion to the sensitive critic. Worrying about art (surely there are more urgent things to worry about) has become more than a popular pastime; it is a trade. Some of us used to hire critics to look at things for us and to tell us what they are about, as if direct exposure to a work itself, unscreened by words, could cause physical damage. Now critics are employed also to do our worrying for us. As such, Rosenberg is worth re-reading. As a man who is up to his eyes in involvement with the artists' dilemma, he does provide insight and a certain amount of clarification. Reviewing the Power Lectures for the years 1968-1973 is like reviewing the scripts and scores of a Command Performance for British Royalty at a variety theatre without having been present. Popular lectures sponsored by the Power Institute of Fine Arts in the University of Sydney, Australia. are of more importance as entertainment than as *Dept. of General Studies, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU. England. scholarship and so they should be if the star performers are flown half way round the...