Page 17 - Studio International - November 1967

come to think of it, end up trussed and
stuffed in a museum himself.
So far, though, this is his business. Why
shouldn't he amuse himself? The danger
and the worry lie in the noise that is made
around him, in his association with art, in
the implication (his and/or other people's)
that this is the new art, come to make the
other stuff look dead even if it is still
breathing. But what is he offering us ? An
activity that is without quality, being
without development. Any attempt to
evaluate it is in itself futile, since no-one
will be able to check the evaluation, nor to
re-evaluate the event for another generation.
The essential function of art is to last. Art
is what remains after other things have
gone. All the various social functions that
well-meaning men wish on to it are as
nothing to this: that art is what links men
through millennia, forwards and
backwards —even more directly than words,
where words remain, permitting uniquely
direct confrontation even where our literal
understanding is incomplete. Quality in art
equals intensification, and that is the vital
charge that empowers the art of a long-past
age to respond to the question we ask it
about ourselves.
Of course happenings and other events
attract a great deal of invention and wit.
It may be, too, that some of the events
themselves (as opposed to the notion of the
event as such) have real though fleeting
significance by giving expression to
something that really matters. In that case
the event makers are depriving us all of that
expression by not troubling to find a more
considerable (literally) form for it. It is
precisely the attractiveness of the event as
flash-in-pan gesture, at a time when the
notoriety of art makes communication
particularly difficult, that makes it a
treacherous line of regression. There can be
no substitute for art but art. q

Dr Willem Sandberg was director of the Stedelijk Charles Harrison, assistant editor of Studio Inter- Alan Bowness is senior lecturer in the history of 19th
Museum, Amsterdam until 1963, and has been Vice- national, studied art history at Cambridge University and 20th century art at the Courtauld Institute,
President of the Dutch Arts Council for many years. and the Courtauld Institute. He is engaged on a University of London. He was a member of the jury
He is now Chairman of the Executive Committee of history of British art between the wars. for the São Paulo Bienal.
the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He is a member of
the jury of ROSC, the Dublin international exhibition. Gene Baro, a frequent contributor to Studio Interna- Book reviewers are listed on page 240.
Dr Sandberg is also a distinguished typographer, tional, also contributes to Art International, the London
and the layout of pp. 200-203 is based in part on his Magazine, and other periodicals and is London Acknowledgements
suggestions. Correspondent of Arts Magazine and Art in America. We wish to thank the British Council for the loan of
the colour block for Alan Davie's The cow that said
how.