The children come out of school happy and laughing, strolling contentedly along or running at full tilt, shouting goodbyes to one another and snapping their books shut in each other’s faces, pushing and shoving and thumping backs. They go home on foot or by bike or in the vast black limousine chauffeured by a peaked cap and a pair of white gloves.
But meanwhile an idea has been implanted in their minds that will be difficult to change for the rest of their lives. Among other things, they have learnt that art is confined to painting, sculpture, poetry and architecture…. That painting is done with oil on canvas, that sculpture is three-dimensional and made of bronze or marble, that poetry is language made to rhyme, that architecture…. That the most beautiful art is that of the distant past, that modern art stopped being good after the Impressionists, that visual art imitates nature, and that in painting and sculpture there must be a meaning (that is, a literary content) or it is not art.
And in fact you only have to go to a proper museum to see what visual art really is, and how paintings and pieces of sculpture have to be made, with due allowance for different styles and periods of course, and of course with the exception of our own period.
Then perhaps these children happen to see an exhibition of modern sculpture, and come face to face with a perfectly flat statue, a statue with no profile and no third dimension, or a painting with coloured things stuck on to its surface, in which the bas relief effect is of the greatest importance. A painting in three dimensions. And yet the three-dimensional picture is behind glass in a gilt frame and the two-dimensional statue is on a pedestal. How are they to come to terms with these contradictions?
But this is nothing compared with what they might meet with later on. For example, a huge painting expressing social protest, with poor peasants being kicked to death by capitalists (a very expensive painting, such as you will only find in the drawing-rooms of capitalist country houses on the shores of Lake Como). But this picture is done in Impressionist-Cubist style, using strong colours and a very simple pictorial design, because although it is a unique piece and very expensive it has to be readily understood by everyone. Or take another kind of protest picture, made of rubbish, rags and old iron (there are pieces of sculpture like this too) all thrown together into a frame, though naturally by the hand of an artist. This is a work of art, a unique work of art, and very nice it will look — such an artistic contrast — among the cut glass and shining silverware of a prosperous middle-class home. It will bear witness to how indulgent we solid men are towards the wicked artist.
How is it that our times are producing such works of art? A realistic monochrome picture of a lavatory seat. A transparent plastic box full of second-hand dentures. A tinned blackbird signed by the artist. Ten one pound tins of the same. A tailor’s dummy painted white, a canvas bundle tied with 100,000 different pieces of string, a machine that does your doodles for you. A picture made by pouring on paint at random. A postcard of Portsmouth twelve feet by six. A toothpaste tube twelve yards long. A blown-up detail of a strip-cartoon.
Is this not perhaps the mirror of our society, where the incompetent landlubbers are at the helm, where deceit is the rule, where hypocrisy is mistaken for respecting the opinions of others, where human relationships are falsified, where corruption is the norm, where scandals are hushed up, where a thousand laws are made and none obeyed?
But what about the art critics whose job it is to explain these things and make them clear? What have they got to say about it? They say that here we have a lyric poem in pure frontal visuality that avoids three-dimensional language in order to reinstate man in the field of semantic-entropic discourse so as to achieve a new dimension that is quite the reverse of Kitsch and exists on the plane of objectivized and reversible Time as Play….
That is why young people are all in love with the Beatles and live in houses with good solid nineteenth-century pictures, like the pictures they are taught about at school.
Why have we become like gods as technologists and like devils as moral beings, supermen in science and idiots in aesthetics—idiots above all in the Greek sense of absolutely isolated individuals, incapable of communicating among themselves or understanding one another? (Lewis Mumford)