Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Heft 44))

pulsion as I have been considering until now. As a matter of fact, very few
persons critically concerned with art, are at this time free from the spell of
the Zeitgeist. They have undoubtedly felt for some time the newer current
of thought towards an art freed from external sanctions of contemporaneity.
And yet, they can not emancipate themselves from their acquired way of
subservience to the time-spirit. They are bent on contorting all their in-
dividuality to the mould of the public day—the day into which their bodies
were born—instead of letting their spirit’s day blossom forth for the purpose
of uplifting their age. They share the error of rampant contemporaneity,
whose advocates assume that there exists for every chronological moment
a universal level of individual development, and who arrogate to themselves
the right to sift all humanity and to condemn all that does not pass through
the meshes of their sieve—which is their only measure of what they call
“to-day.” This those pillars of the time-spirit preach with such religious
zeal that they make all of us long, with all our might, to pass through the
sieve by hook or crook, hence it is small wonder to see us all, including artists,
bending all our energies to diminish our individuality to the public-approved
caliber, or to soften it oyster-like, to let it somehow slip through the all-
saving meshes.
Does not this state of things show that not only do the artists betray the
effects of inundation by the mob-spirit-sanctioned thought, but, also, that
they manifest fully conscious, deliberate leanings in favor of the discredited
art-formula? As it is, they are impressing even the well-meaning, unprej-
udiced part of the public with the narrow interpretation of the Zeitgeist’s
relation to art, so that the only element of possible progress is led away
from the cause of free art. From such a frame of the artists’ mind I
conclude that they share the difficulty, which we all feel in ridding our-
selves from the shadows of past error—from the effects of conscious as well
as unconscious supports of contemporaneity in art.
The deliberate supports of the Zeitgeist’s domination in art, which I now
wish to size up, seem to me falling into three more or less distinctly defined
classes—according to the different ways one might select to connect existing
reality with art. One class of persons might choose to see reality’s excuse
for its existence in the fact that it happens to be the only available model
for one’s vision (or camera). Another might take things in an order directly
reversed to this and come to see the eye’s only raison d'etre in its self-denying
vision, in its willingness to do “to-day’s” bidding. A third, more artful,
might place his mediating point of view between reality and art and say:
“You are both the cream of the earth; the twain of you of one blood and
flesh, and as you are the only couple on God’s earth I venture to advance a
scientific conclusion that you are destined to a rather limited yet most for-
tunate connubial choice.”
Out of the first of these three ways of thinking springs the class of people
who demand that art do for us what Zeuxis’ grapes did for the birds, or what

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