This Art Business

There is no pleasanter room at V.U.C. than Mr. Miller's Art Room, and there are books to peruse there that are a perpetual delight, but what is one to make of the latest works of art? Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso (in some moods), "Art Now" nd the like. Having passed through all the stages of Mirth Uncontrollable, Simple Amazement, Indignation Intense and Frustrated Inquiry, the only thing now seems to be to make my perplexity public. I have done my best with the appreciative memoris and this is the kind of thing I learn—"To reproduce a (human) figure directly in stone seems to him a monstrous perversion of stone, and in any case a misrepresentation of the qualities of flesh and blood. Representational figure sculpture can never be anything but a travesty of one material in another." Very good, but why in that case insist on calling your monstrosity a "Woman Reclining" or "Mother and Child"? Call it if you like "Relief Map of the Andes," "Strange Potato Formation dug up by Johnsonville Resident," or "Design for Pawnbroker's Shop Sign," and there will be little to quarrel about. Again we are told that the modenr artist does not aim at reproducing what he sees. "Art is a mental thing" ("Mental" sounds right in the context!). In other words what he tries to set down is the emotional effect produced in him by the particular object. Again we say "Very good." No one objects to subjectivity in art. But how is it that the mental states thus induced and so expressed are so constantly ugly, malformed, unnatural?

In search of enlightenment,