Resnick / Reinhardt Debate

by Geoffrey Dorfman
Excerpted with permission from the author.

Ad Reinhardt: I’m going to try and approach the thing pretty much from a different point of view. I want to try and cover Milton’s ideas and restate them in my own terms. Now the two of us originated that title a couple of weeks ago; it was a long time ago, anyway. I think we thought of it as kind of an impersonal thing that the audience would participate in. However, perhaps the two of us can pick it up.

Now the word attack. That immediately calls to mind an article in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago on Sidney Janis and it was called, “Why Fight It?” I’m going to keep that in mind because I think that’s a key term—“Why fight it?” Certainly the opposite of what attack would mean.

Now, Milton brought up the idea of a system, a system of thought. I would perhaps call it, “the establishment.” At any rate, “things as they are.” If you think things as they are are fine, they don’t make you unhappy, they don’t outrage you, then I guess there is nothing to say; you be as happy as a lark then. Now suppose things aren’t right, or maybe you don’t like the word, “right.” Perhaps they’re rotten, or corrupt. Well then, what’s rotten?

What’s corrupt? It’s been very easy to say that the institutions are at fault, the critics, the collectors, the curators, the managers, or the middlemen are at fault. I think I would attack—and I’ll be as specific as anyone wants me to be, for I think this is a way to be impersonal about it; however I’ll be as personal as necessary too—I think the artists are responsible. If there’s anything rotten or corrupt today it’s the artist’s fault. Now, what artists? Do you want to lump all the artists together? Do you want to separate them? Naturally, you’d have to say what artists. There have been some strong statements made lately but they’ve been made by other people rather than by artists. Now, I wonder why that should come up. For example, Thomas Hess has written over and over again about the “saturated mass communications mediums,” the “taste bureaucracy,” the “disgusting irresponsibility of that masquerade of good will, the ideas of enemies posing as the artists’ friends,” “This American power elite that is today as oppressive a force as the most monstrously philistine ogre.” Is this true? These are all quotes. There’s no question there’s terminology like, “power elite,” “taste bureaucracy,” or “taste maker,” the “genial society,” the “affluent society,” and that relates to the general social situation. But what about corruption and immorality specifically in the arts?

It’s easy to say commercialism or careerism or professional painting have become a racket like every other racket, a business like every other business.

I haven’t heard any artist for a long time raise the question of fine art as a useless art, or as an art that’s not involved, or that’s not a means of making a living or living a life. I think de Kooning once said, quite a long time ago that art was a style of living, etc. I think that’s what curators wanted to hear. I think that was a way of indicating that art was to be mixed up with a great deal of things, that art could become something that was not a separate thing anymore, that it could be manipulated and read into and used in a number of ways. Now, if this is true than the artist is—might be—irresponsible. Now, if we have an agent of accommodation generally, what might it be in art?

If there is any doubt that we have taste-making and hidden persuasion operating; all of these terms come from people who have been part of the system, part of the establishment. That’s become a problem to deal with. As far as I can see. it is an oppressive situation and not free, not truly competitive. As Milton indicated, it may very well be closed down, or closed up. This has made for a real mechanical—and I borrow this phrase—an almost “lobotomized unanimity” about everything. There’s almost no challenging. Hardly anyone ever challenges, say, the Museum of Modern Art or ARTnews or Arts magazine. I wonder why that would be? Of course, the only ones who could challenge it properly are artists. Last week one of the artists said, “Someone else might raise these questions; they have nothing to lose.” Well, it’s precisely that artists evidently have something to lose. I wonder what? What would artists have to lose? And what are they losing now? There’s no question there’s a chorus and so many people live by other people’s notions and ideas. There’s a fantastic amount of parroting now and an attempt to settle everything. I don’t know of any curator or critic or historian or collector who doesn’t think he has a sure thing now. Because someone told them who the sure things are. Artists are guilty of contributing to that. Artists have contributed to a situation where things seem to be unquestioned. What is unquestioned is precisely this Life magazine art and probably Life magazine life, too; the lives of movie celebrities, the lives of living it up, affluence, money, commercialism. Now, I’m not speaking about having a good time or against someone having money or not, however I think everyone is familiar with what commercialism represents—at least to a fine artist. Milton brought up the question of art as property. We know we have art as a marketable commodity today and massified. The only way I can think of pinning down something wrong there is not payola or anything like that, but just the pay itself. I would object to art being a commodity at all, especially involved in pleasing and selling. Now, if we’re involved in a profession of pleasing and selling, we ought to label it that. We ought to pin it down that way so that we know what that is.

The trouble with this whole mechanism is that it does force everybody into a pattern, the whole dealer structure, the whole museum-dealer structure—whatever outlet—whatever relation an artist has, forces an artist into a pattern so that it’s not only the process of consumption that’s controlled by the mass media but the process of production as well. It works retroactively also.

There’s a tendency generally to leave matters in the hands of constituted authority, proper authorities. We’ve witnessed in the last couple of weeks artists who want to leave things up to someone else—philosophically maybe to some kind of fate, a lucky break, or circumstance. There was a real objection, a kind of excited objection, to an artist being responsible for his own meaning, his own content, and whatever happens to him and his work. This is the same question as, “Why Fight It?” Perhaps the feeling of oppression, a kind of despair, has resulted from this. There certainly is a resignation, and a passivity about artists today. “Why fight it?” is certainly the answer.

Coming back to the artist, the problem of fault or guilt or shame; in this situation the artist has to somehow be an anti-intellectual, to stress unconscious or inarticulate ideas. Not only does the art become a manipulable thing, but the artist himself becomes a manipulated symbol. For example, the latest Life magazine avant garde art that I saw involved four artists: Kline, de Kooning, Still and Rothko; and they evidently permitted their work to be treated as pictures of flames, girders, grasses and sunsets. Does the art permit this? Does the art permit Life magazine making anything they want of it? This may make for a corrupt situation too; a kind of art that seems to excite, perhaps entertain. It certainly seems to be accessible and maybe involved in quickly exhausted values. There isn’t anything I can think of that can’t be read into those pictures: events, brutality, poetry, experience, streets, jazz, all sorts of associations and representations. I think that someone has mentioned that this is a kind of built-in obsolescence which has a quick turnover. I think we have to face the fact that the art work itself is a problem as well as the artist and let go the social situation for a while.

The art work itself doesn’t seem to have a limit to that which can be read into it. Now, I know this is always a problem with Romantic art; however, there’s something wrong about an art that permits everyone to project their personal wishes into it. There’s also something wrong about the image of an artist that permits everyone to think that they can do it too. If this jerk can do it than I can do it too. I think you’re familiar with the artist as patronized idiot, a kind of everyday Joe, an ordinary fellow but a genius at the same time. It’s part of that myth where the inarticulate rustic is also a sage or the wisdom of the bumpkin and so forth. It embarrasses me—apart from sometimes outraging me—embarrasses me, to see artists who follow along from period to period. I don’t know what to think when I see someone who was so committed to a social protest point of view—social realist art—making abstractions now. I don’t want to exclude the idea that maybe you learn or develop or progress but somehow it’s a shame to give up such a strong commitment. The same with the abstract artist who moves towards the figure as if there was something that negates what they stood for. I don’t want to call it an accommodation to the times but evidently that’s what it is. There’s naturally too much identification with success or fame. It’s also a little embarrassing to see the hunger of artists for attention and the hunger over a period of years, as if this is what you wanted really; that Life magazine is what you wanted all along. There’s certainly too much admiration for the ability to get publicity. And the admiration of, I don’t know how many artists who practically made a career out of, “Me ’n Pollock,” the expression, “Me ’n Pollock.” (laughter)

I want to attack the myth of the artist alone in his studio not knowing anything, not thinking anything and then finishing the picture and then the expression I mention lots of times, “Someone else does the dirty work.” I don’t think that’s true. Any artist who says that he doesn’t think about anyththing, that somebody else handles everything for him, is usually not telling the truth and I often wonder why it’s said to other artists. It’s certainly alright for business reasons to tell the public, but why should it be said to other artists when there isn’t any truth to it? Except perhaps in the case of primitives, primitive painters. We witnessed an artist here a few weeks ago who was quite insulted because the question of the artists’ responsibility came up—well, it was Larry Rivers—and he acted as if he was never involved with the public and never went on T.V. or anything else. He acted as if he was alone in his studio all the time and that something went on that didn’t have anything to do with him. Well, I simply bring this up to indicate who has these ideas and who repeats these ideas.

I wrote a series of quotations on a leaflet recently in which I quoted a lot of the artists fairly impersonally. There are a lot of artists who have been built up into symbols and I think their quotations are fairly significant, not because I’ve picked them up, but because they’ve been repeated dozens and dozens of times. Now, why should they be repeated dozens and dozens of times by curators and critics and catalogues? Why should those particular quotations have appeared over and over the last ten or fifteen years? Repeated by people who have never had any sympathy for art or abstract art in the last twenty years? Naturally the question of consciousness, control, and responsibility comes up. What the artist could do, I’m not sure. I know the idea of a pure art or a pure artist has come up as not manipulatable. It’s part of that dichotomy of a free and servile art. Now, you can’t talk about fine art in any other terms. The minute you open it up in some way, first, artists talk about, “having to eat.” That begins it, as if artists have to eat any more or less than anyone else. But artists have to eat and that goes for critics too. Critics have to eat. But the next thing is for life or for some other-than-art idea; a house with children or things like that.

I’ve mentioned a number of times how serious the shows, “Nature and Abstraction” and the “New Images of Man” were at the Whitney and at the Museum of Modern Art. Now it seems as if artists will show anywhere they can today and everyone is pleased to get anything at all. I don’t know how to conclude this particularly, except with the portrait of the artist as a successful schnook or the portrait of the artist as a company man. I think the worst thing I could think of would be the artist as company man. Do you want to add anything?