art is art, everything else is everything else
ad reinhardt
Talking To Myself Again
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