To the Editors:
Your special issue, “The Arts in America 1945-1985” (Summer, 1985), is a valuable contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the past forty years. I particularly enjoyed the articles on art and music and agree with the points that were made.
The only statement that slightly raised my eyebrow was Hilton Kramer’s comment regarding the failure of the American art world to rebut the political attack on postwar Abstract Expressionism as contained, for example, in Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. “Their silence,” Mr. Kramer wrote, “can only be accounted for, I think, by their fear of being seen to take an anti-Left position on what is as much a political as a cultural controversy.” While the silence is regrettable, I think an equally valid case can be made for a much simpler explanation: that the effort to place a cold-war ideological perspective on American postwar painting is so ridiculous and detached from reality that few if any painters or writers can be bothered to refute it. Putting it another way, if someone wrote a book today suggesting that the earth is flat, could any of our leading scientists be sufficiently exercised to reply?
Donald M. Blinken
New York City
Hilton Kramer replies:
We are pleased that Mr. Blinken has found so much to admire in our special issue on “The Arts in America 1945-1985.”
His “simpler explanation” regarding the “failure of the American art world to rebut the political attack” contained in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art does not seem to account for the facts, however. It is no doubt true that our leading scientists would not respond to a book which claimed the earth to be flat. They would ignore such a book as a fraud, and regard its author as a crank. But the sad truth is that the American art world does not conduct its affairs with a similar devotion to truth—even the truth about its own recent past. The fact is, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art has not been ignored, and its author is not regarded as a crank or a fraud. He has been invited to participate in scholarly conferences at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and his writings on American art are now assigned reading in many university courses in art history. (See, for example, Pollock and After, edited by Francis Frascina and published this year by Harper & Row—a book obviously intended for classroom use.) The view that Mr. Blinken rightly regards as “ridiculous” and “detached from reality” is, alas, precisely the view of this subject that is being taught on many campuses and expounded in many journals and academic forums today.