Tompkins Gallery

The arbiters of culture in the 1950s prided themselves on holding out against the indiscriminate, the meretricious, and the trashy, which were pouring from the mass media; and the pretentious and the arty, which were the stamp of what was then universally known as “middlebrowism.” They sought to do this by insisting on a classic conception of culture and by setting forth a trans-historical and transcendental criterion for the judgement of art. Perhaps the most incisive formulation of this point of view was Hannah Arendt’s “Works of art,” she wrote, “are made for the sole purpose of appearance. The proper criterion by which to judge appearance is beauty… in order to become aware of appearances we must first be free to establish a certain distance between ourselves and the object…”

We have here a Greek view of art in which culture is essentially contemplative. Art is not life, but in a sense something contrary to life, since life is transient and changing, while art is permanent. To this Miss Arendt adds the Hegelian concept of objectification. A work of art is the projection by the creative person of an idea or an emotion into an object outside himself: “…What is at stake here,” Miss Arendt wrote, “is much more than the psychological state of the artist; it is the objective status of the cultural world which insofar as it contains tangible things—books and paintings, statues, buildings, and music—comprehends, and gives testimony to, the entire recorded past of countries, nations, and ultimately of mankind. As such the only nonsocial and authentic criterion for judging these specifically cultural things is their relative permanence and even eventual immortality. Only what will last through the centuries can ultimately claim to be a cultural object.”

1. Arendt,Hannah. "The Crisis in Culture," in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Viking, 1961), p. 202.

The paradox is that this view—which in the 1960s came to seem so archaic—was undercut not by the lowbrows or the middlebrows but by the highbrows, the very prelectors of modern culture themselves. For in seeking to define what was distinctive about the new sensibility, they denied precisely the terms set for by Miss Arendt. The locus of art and culture, they argued, had moved from the independent work to the personality of the artist, from the permanent object to the transient process. It was Harold Rosenberg, explicating the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and other “action painters,” as he called them, who first stated the concept forcefully. “At a certain moment,” Rosenberg wrote, “the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ and object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event… In this gesturing with materials the aesthetic, too, has been subordinated. Form, color, composition, drawing… can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act.”

If painting is an action, there is no difference between the preliminary sketch and the finished object. The second cannot be “better” or more complete than the first. There are no preliminaries or hierarchies in art, and each act is an event by itself. In effect, the work is dissolved in the act, and so is the critic. “The new painting,” Mr. Rosenberg concluded, “has broken down every distinction between art and life. It follows that anything is relevant to it. Anything that has to do with action—psychology, philosophy, history, mythology, hero-worship. Anything but art criticism. The painter gets away from art through his act of painting; the critic can’t get away from it. The critic who goes on judging in terms of schools, styles, form—as if the painter was still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art) instead o living of the canvas—is bound to seem a stranger.”

2.Rosenberg, Harold (1952). "The Action Painters." Art News, LI, 42-44.

Bell, Daniel. "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism," in Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 6, No. 1/2, Special Double Issue: Capitalism, Culture, and Education (Jan. - Apr., 1972), pp. 53-65.