The Elusive Values: A study of contemporary artistic forms

Extract

Perhaps the greatest paradox in modem art, popular or esoteric, is the gap between the sort of music and verse which expresses itself in breathless, banal statements (often, incidentally, employing a diluted version of the poetic diction of the Romantic poets of the last century), and the quiet, withdrawn, secret and mysterious world of Abstract Expressionism and atonal music. It is as if two kinds of art were constantly at cold war with one another, and as if neither knew what war they were fighting in or who were their enemies. There is no communication, either friendly or aggressive, and the reader, the listener, the looker at pictures seems to be in a state of siege which he or she has not chosen and is powerless to explain.

Since communications between these two different kinds of art seem to have broken down so painfully, we are left with the spectacle of a world where man seeks stimulus through art, yet is not prepared to admit that art is, in some sense, amenable to reason, and where most people believe that if you are ‘with it’, as the current phrase goes, you will be happy, accepted and fulfilled. The Beat poets appear to have taken this dubious credo to its logical conclusion when they seek peace in the oblivion provided by drugs and in a kind of pseudo-mysticism which has little to do either with discipline or God.

Are we then to conclude that this is a decadent, a dead age, a century which is suffering from accidie rather than from violence or masochism? I do not myself think so. In Action Painting, Beat Poetry, and so on, I see an attempt to be realistic and honest, and to achieve something which has nothing to do with nihilism or despair.