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acterizes the realism exhibited. And, like the abstraction, the realism is as superficial as possible, nearly always about nothing rather than something. In this department Robert Vickrey (a Time cover-artist) and Jules Kirschenbaum compete for the rotten apple.

I suppose it is no good trying to stop this trend toward a sort of bogus exactitude as substitute for draughtsmanship, for it is a compensatory device against the welter of emotions that slops around throughout most of the Whitney. Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu might be the most polite way of accrediting the orgiastic climax, or last luxury of romanticism, toward which American avant-garde art has moved in the past ten years. Plato’s artist-emoter leers at us from abstraction after abstraction (and the echo comes back in the prices paid in deals like the Lurcy sale for works by that now Holly woodized “inspired idiot,” Van Gogh). Only occasionally now is the theory of artist as sybil corrected, as when the Report on the Visual Arts at Harvard University noted that “Few people believe that an author, a poet, or a composer might be slow- witted, if not frankly insane,” or when a Rudolf Arnheim writes on art as accident in last fall’s Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, We export a literature of rationalism, a painting of emotional reversion.

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acterizes the realism exhibited. And, like the abstraction, the realism is as superficial as possible, nearly always about nothing rather than something. In this department Robert Vickrey (a Time cover-artist) and Jules Kirschenbaum compete for the rotten apple.

I suppose it is no good trying to stop this trend toward a sort of bogus exactitude as substitute for draughtsmanship, for it is a compensatory device against the welter of emotions that slops around throughout most of the Whitney. Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu might be the most polite way of accrediting the orgiastic climax, or last luxury of romanticism, toward which American avant-garde art has moved in the past ten years. Plato’s artist-emoter leers at us from abstraction after abstraction (and the echo comes back in the prices paid in deals like the Lurcy sale for works by that now Holly woodized “inspired idiot,” Van Gogh). Only occasionally now is the theory of artist as sybil corrected, as when the Report on the Visual Arts at Harvard University noted that “Few people believe that an author, a poet, or a composer might be slow- witted, if not frankly insane,” or when a Rudolf Arnheim writes on art as accident in last fall’s Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, We export a literature of rationalism, a painting of emotional reversion.