Political Stress Is Always Apt To Shrink

America Is A Construction Of Mind, Not Of Race Or Inherited Class Or Ancestral Territory.

Far From Affording Artists Continuous Inspiration, Mass-media Sources For Art Have Become A Dead End. They Have Combined With The Abstractness Of Institutional Art Teaching To Produce A Fine-arts Culture Given Over To Information And Not Experience. This Faithfully Echoes The Drain Of Concreteness From Modern Existence- The Reign Of Mere Unassimilated Data Instead Of Events That Gain Meaning By Being Absorbed Into The Fabric Of Imaginative Life.

A Gustave Courbet Portrait Of A Trout Has More Death In It Than Rubens Could Get In A Whole Crucifixion.

It Was A Secular Cathedral, Dedicated To The Rites Of Travel.

What Has Our Culture Lost In 1980 That The Avant-garde Had In 1890? Ebullience, Idealism, Confidence, The Belief That There Was Plenty Of Territory To Explore, And Above All The Sense That Art, In The Most Disinterested And Noble Way, Could Find The Necessary Metaphors By Which A Radically Changing Culture Could Be Explained To Its Inhabitants.