Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1914 (Heft 46))

ARTISTS AND OTHERS

WHATEVER its actual value, the art of our age is surely in fashion.
While not lodged in our hearts, it has found a more prominent
berth on our tongues. If we were to estimate its merit by the notoriety
it enjoys, we would have to adjudge its value as very high indeed. However,
one is not likely to take notoriety for virtue at an age when the halo of repute
is machine-made, in fifty-seven varieties, to fit all monger-hallowed skulls.
In fact, some of us are apt to regard with suspicion and waive aside
anything tinged with the blatant light that is all the rage nowadays.
We might have been tempted to do this also with art were we not certain of its
fundamental mission in life. We are sure of its mission even if we don’t
exactly know why, or, perhaps the more so because of the unreasoned char-
acter of this conviction. As a result of this, I say, we believe in art not-
withstanding its discrediting features. But there is also another cause for our
faithful attitude. There is a feeling strongly alive in us that we, laymen, are
not entitled to another position in this matter as long as art is, naturally, a
special manifestation of a number of privileged men, of a sort of aesthetic
brotherhood, whose rites and incantations, while undoubtedly universal in their
appeal, can not but remain the secret of the anointed.
Our religious nurture has helped us wonderfully to preserve the notion of
priesthoods in all fields of human endeavor. While there is an undeniable gain
in life-economy accruing from an apportionment of social functions to
specialists, there is a serious danger involved in such procedure. It tends to
engender an uncritical submission to group-dictates at a cost of an impoverish-
ment of personality. Such a result, generally following upon an unguarded
allegiance to authority, is unmistakably apparent in our present art-life. Not
only have we succeeded in establishing a tribe of aesthetic high priests but
we have also reduced our art-feeling to catechismal form and limit. From
religion we have come to devotion, which means that we do not let our faith
come from our hearts but from our external senses, from the outskirts of our
being and not from its individual depths. The latter we leave to wither from
disuse. The only ones profiting by this course are not the true advocates of
humanity but those of a dwarfed type of it.
It is not only our popular life that suffers by the prevalent attitude
towards art. Art itself is degenerating into a form essentially technical. It
applies to itself measures physical rather than spiritual; it seeks merely external
perfection; it is dominated by its tools, rules, methods and even whims; it
mistakes the symbol for the thing; it courts shadows deeming them souls.
Of course, artists may assert that nature herself puts their work in a class
all by itself. They might say that theirs is a specially dowered nature, an excep-
tional capacity; and that it is this alone that forms them into a caste; that it is
of no earthly use to any of us unconsecrated-ones to fidget and squirm because
of our dependence upon them; that general, unquestioned submission to the art-

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