The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake by Morris Eaves

Abstract

636 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Much of his evaluation of tactics and technology is up to his high stan­ dards. Too often, however, he sounds like a Pentagon staffer briefing the media. He uses the term “regrettably” (p. 172) in telling of the first combat death ofa U.S. pilot but does not offer the same sentiment for downed Iraqi pilots. The official air force summary of the GulfWar issued in March 1993 agrees with Hallion that air power was the key element in the victory. But generally it presents a less glowing analysis and does not claim that air power has demonstrated overwhelming superiority in the realm of arms. Hallion writes that air power “had clearly proven its ability not merely to be decisive in war ... but to be the determinant ofvictory in war” (p. 264). The air force summarystates: “We are probably too close to the GulfWar of 1991 to draw definite conclusions from it about the nature offuture war” (p. 206). The summary is less enthusiastic about the impact of technology such as the stealth aircraft, stressing, while Hallion does not, that it was only stealthy at night and a number of missions had to be canceled because of vulner­ ability to bad weather. The summary is less prone to make rosy claims for achievements against Iraq’s nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons facilities. It admits that the Iraqi air force survived better than coalition air leaders expected. In contrast, Hallion states: “the Iraqi air force died ignominiously” (p. 195). Both summary and Hallion agree that air power in its close air support and interdiction roles pinned down, isolated, and demoralized Iraqi forces in Kuwait and made possible the skilled, short, and relatively bloodless (for coalition forces) ground campaign. It would have been better to wait for the summary as an aid in writing the definitive history when Hallion is no longer air force historian. Wesley Phillips NewtonDr . Newton is professor emeritus of history, Auburn University. His most recent book, coauthored with Stephen L. McFarland, is To Command the Sky: The Battlefor Air Superiority over Germany, 1942-1944 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age ofBlake. By Morris Eaves. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. xxix+286; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $37.95. William Blake, the 18th-century English engraver and painter, coined the term “Counter Arts” to describe the powerful commercial and political interests that he believed were exploiting and repressing the creative artists of his day. In his writings, Blake rejected current popular theories about the arts, including the idea of their westward progress from classical Greece to modern Britain, the belief that images reached perfection historically by the shift from linear into tonal styles, and the notion that contemporary commercial engraving was a boon to artists. Writing in favor of the individual artist-engraver, Blake sought to reunite the mental and material phases of production of the arts. He viewed the commercial division of labor into easily repeated steps, as was found in TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 637 the large studios and shops of more successful painters and engravers, as leading to mediocrity. He saw this separation of roles as a system introduced in the reign of Charles I by Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck, who, in Morris Eaves’s interpretation of Blake’s views, “were part of a larger European bid to expand commerce, stabilize the monarchy and block republican reforms” (p. 159). Recognizing that Blake’s theories have been categorized as those ofan outsider, Eaves, a professor of English and author of William Blake’ s Theory ofArt (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), seeks “to place Blake’s ideas about art in the most useful narrative contexts, which were . . . other English ideas about art” (p. xvii). He cites the failure of traditional art history to do this, or even to provide the context. He makes use of recent interpretive and theoretical studies of English art and related commercial issues, as well as new methodologies in the study ofliterature, to create a brief history of 18th-century English art. Eaves focuses on four topics derived from a close reading...