Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1909 (Heft 27))

AMERICAN INDIFFERENCE

IN artistic matters, the crime of the American is indifference. Squat
on her haunches, sucking at the dripping dugs of the Golden Calf,
Columbia would use a Monet or a Whistler for a seat—if they
were not worth gold. Stupidity and Vulgarity, thy name is
America!
The rare, the strange, the beautiful, the new—whether in art
or literature—is taboo to the American mind. No word exalts the American
mind like the word Respectability. It is its shibboleth. Poe was its most
famous victim.
The average American passes dumbly, hat in hand, before the Accepted
Names as though he had entered a fane dedicated to Mammon. In the
paradise of cowards, he is the tetrarch.
On the waxed and shining ramparts of this Eden of Indifference struts
Conformity dressed like a flunky. Behind him shambles the lackey Hypoc-
risy, muffled in gold-leaf. From beyond the walls, from deep within this
laboratory of the vulgar, the stupid, the mediocre, the bourgeois, is blown a
sickening odor. It comes from those millions upon millions of beings whose
souls are without drainage.
This giant conspiracy of mediocrity, this race-thesaurus of the average,
has in all ages been the sworn enemy of all that is new, radical, anti-academic,
in art. Artistic respectability is the crime of the American. In the sphere
of morals this spirit invents anti-vice societies to protect its own mind against
its own pornographic instincts. In the sphere of art it shuns genius like a
plague. It has never given the world a brave act, a big thought, a beautiful
idea, a great poem, a great picture, a great book. Food and sex—they are
the axes on which indifference and respectability turn; for it, life is only
significant below the navel.
In this country it is impossible to compute the number of artistic geniuses
that have been chloroformed in the House of Indifference. Bribed, beaten,
threatened, crushed under debt and poverty, the spark of artistic and mental
revolt has been extinguished in these minds; and so they have continued to
exist in this House of the Great Garlic Stench and have died with the chaplet
of the ordained virtues on their brows, pews paid up to date, the coffin neatly
beflowered by opera subscribers.
At birth, handed iron lances to fling at the sun, they have come to cut them
into darning needles and book-cutters. Foundlings of ideas, pregnant with
dreams, they farmed themselves out to Rote, their dreams paling to ashy
fears. Their hands outstretched toward the open seas of the Strange, the
Beautiful, the Unknown, they have felt in their muscles the palsy of willess-
ness before the giant icy hand of Indifference or the croonings of senile Respect-
ability. The fine purple coat of artistic and moral rebellion has become a
seedy house jacket and the sandals of fire are exchanged for carpet slippers
that convey one noiselessly over the plush conventions.

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