Page 44 - Studio International - January 1971

crisis of our culture is that 'the defensiveness the streets may not be safe enough for an
and guilt of those who now know that they evening stroll. 'The claim to express every-
have nothing to say is compounded by the thing can only exacerbate feelings of being
ascendancy of those who say that there should nothing. In such a mood, all limits begin to
be no guides.'3 The confrontation is not, as feel like humiliations.'
hitherto, between an old set of rules and a new `Artists the curse of the world' Oldenburg says
set, but between an old set and no rules at all. in America: War and Sex etc. 'They know how
What characterizes the new is rather its pro- to start things but not how to stop them.
jection of 'artistic freedom' into the public `When Ray Gun shoots, no-one dies. Art
domain. Art is no longer the mediator between child's play. Art as life as murder. Hitler, he
private and public life, a culturally agreed erased half of Europe, but the world is not a
area where anything can be expressed, but is drawing. . . . To draw is a fact: to make
diffused throughout the community as therapy, appear. Only this act is proof of my licence to
in a mode of unbounded self-realization. conjour.'
But, Rieff says, the irreducible function of Certain actions —historic acts, I suppose—
culture is to oppose the expression of everything, resemble art in that their symbolic force is such
and to set out systems of truths like canals that it lifts them out of time. They become part
which men may navigate or divert or erode of a succession of later presents, continually
but not flow over entirely. Wilde, whom he available as models or arguments. Some—
sees as the revolutionary prophet of the pre- Napoleon crowning himself, for example—
sent, 'helped lead an aesthetic movement away were surely executed knowingly 'on the stage
from the dominance of inwardness and to- of history'. Others must have been unpre-
wards an externalization that works against meditated, their significance accruing only
all our received conceptions of character. The after the event. There is something repugnant
genius of modernity is in Wilde's cleverness. about artists aping men of destiny in this way,
That genius is only now being caricatured although it is not surprising in an atmosphere
by a culture which produces revolutionaries where artists are out to make art history rather
who are not oppressed proletarians but failed than art. I find myself going back obsessively
artists.' Art utterly democratized becomes to such occasions, Duchamp and R. Mutt,
politics. In Wilde's Utopia, of which we have Klein's empty 'exhibition', and so on. John
received quite concrete premonitions, where Latham's column of smouldering encyclo-
no one is an artist because every one is an artist, paedias looks to me like Nurenburg, the