Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 30))

SOME REFLECTIONS OF THE FUNCTIONS AND LIMI-
TATIONS OF ART CRITICISM—ESPECIALLY
IN RELATION TO MODERN ART

THE subject of Art, we all feel, is one of the most difficult to handle.
In art, even more than in matters of religion or politics, tastes and
opinions vary so insubstantially as to leave them forever apparently
without prospect of settlement. That, indeed, may be of the life-blood of its
existence; but it also accounts perhaps for that curious first anomaly which we
find in respect of the general attitude towards art, namely: of a large department
of human interest and activity which, while it is one of the least understood
(and often one of the best abused), is nevertheless one of the most generously
tolerated. In art, we are told (and this is true of a great number of artists
themselves) there can be no exegesis; we may like or dislike, praise or blame,
but we cannot explain. And there the matter is supposed to end.
That art, however, can have any really vital and direct application to the
age in which we live is a notion which, naturally enough, rarely enters the
popular mind at all, except it be in a popular sense. But can it be said that
even our more trained and cultured critics are free from this blame ?•—in whom,
so often, the wiser they grow, the more Hamlet-like does their attitude towards
art become; either in finding the present times most woefully out of joint, or
else past times most dismally and tardily great. While the masses are confes-
sedly interested but ignorant, such men on the contrary are but too often un-
interested or simply biassed. It is as if the weight of their learning had tethered
their judgment, and their much study had brought them, in place of joy, a
weariness of the flesh, whereby the unrest that is in their own souls is too often
the prism through which they view the quaint and original productions of
those who are alive and working around them. Of this kind of criticism
there seems to be no end, and we may say of it that it is to be found in the
high, rather than in the proud places of the earth, and is the fruit of knowledge
rather than of understanding, of culture rather than of genuine sentiment, and
belongs to the fashion rather than to the inalienable democracy of true art.
It will be only necessary to give one instance to understand the whole order
to which this class of misacceptation and misbelief belongs. One of the most
authoritative critics in Great Britain recently remarked that “Art in our time
seems by contrast like an iridescent oil spread about on the muddy surface of
our civilization; it and life don’t mix.” That, then, is the whole viewpoint
in a nutshell, and constitutes what I would name the second anomaly in re-
spect of the general attitude towards art, namely: that tolerance, even while it
exists (and often even amounts to a kind of dull enthusiasm) is mainly extended
to what is beautiful in ancient art, and seldom to what is beautiful or strange
in contemporary art.
A third and last anomaly is the almost universal habit of withholding
from the artist (or indeed from the creator and innovator in almost any
genre) the right to as nearly personal a point of view in his work as his
critics reserve for themselves in theirs. These three are the prime embarrass-
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