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

lists’ aesthetic dictates is not a matter of choice but of necessity; that making
a fashion of art, as our age is doing, means no less than an ultimate absorption
into our motor-system of activities which have all too long floated on the sur-
face of our consciousness; that all fundamental activities in our organism are
better taken care of when freed from the strenuous rule of the intellect; that
the artist alone is the part of the social organism in whom racial instinct
should come to a conscious manifestation. The others should thank their
stars for having all of nature’s blessings brought to their tables all ready
for consumption. Let them therefore give their thanks to Providence, and
their doles of allegiance to the artists—for, don’t you know: no penny, no
paternoster.
Personally, I do not at all subscribe to the notion that nature really evolves
an art hierarchy or priesthood. I believe that there is a universal, non-
specialized (that is non-technical) way of feeling and expressing human ex-
perience which alone is art. All else is the dress of art and not its body, its
police-approved demeanor and not its free expression; or its business side
rather than its human side. It is like the Latin without which some old fogies
imagined there could be no science. Now, it is this mask that hides art’s
true form, the only one of universal significance. Conventions, academic or
not, have put their blinkers upon our vision through so long a period that they
have robbed us of all power to see anything but what is prescribed by our
aesthetic preceptors. They have stopped the flow of popular poetry and song
and dance. They have drained the sources of popular plastic creativeness
to such an extent that art coming directly from the people’s spontaneous
hands is now practically unthinkable. Our machine-fashioned industry has
found in conventional art an efficient ally for the suppression of individualism.
Art, the famed symbol of freedom, thus virtually became the instrument of
sinister powers.
When seen in this light, present unthinking confidence in prevailing art
appears as a most culpable blindness, the more so because of the stupendous
social value that is claimed for art. Here is a by no means unusually compre-
hensive formulation of art’s professed functions, coming from the pen of
Bernard Shaw:
“The claim of art to our respect must stand or fall with the validity of its
pretension to cultivate and refine our senses and faculties until seeing, hearing,
feeling, smelling and tasting become highly conscious and critical acts with us,
protesting vehemently against ugliness, noise, discordant speech, frowzy
clothing, and rebreathed air, and taking keen interest and pleasure in beauty,
in music, and in nature, besides making us insist, as necessary for comfort
and decency, on clean wholesome fabrics to wear, and utensils of fine material
and elegant workmanship to handle. Further, art should refine our sense
of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy, greatly heightening our
self-knowledge, self-control, precision of action, and considerateness, and mak-
ing us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice, and intellectual superficiality

14