Art goes on. Art that is transgressive will recur. But it will do so nakedly for anyone who chooses to characterize it, not only for those initiates who congratulate one another on their shared investment in standards of truth, beauty, and good conscience. Cold winds are blowing from the future onto aspirations to provide society, or even segments of society, with a capacity to bridge differences with mutual respect. I’ve often reflected that uses of “we” in critical writing are unavoidably presumptuous, though they are rhetorically meant only to invite, or perhaps to seduce, agreement. I’ve never felt less confidence in the pronoun, at a time of alienations that recall what W. B. Yeats perceived in another pandemic year, 1919: “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
Excerpt from Philip Guston and the Boundaries of Art Culture By Peter Schjeldahl
New Yorker THE ART WORLD OCTOBER 19, 2020
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