Wanted: Artists for Neighbors

Abstract

O RDINARILY artists and art have little place in day-to-day life. The resulting isolation of art and artists has a serious impact upon both artist and layman. The artist, baffled in his attempt to find significant things to say and effective ways of conveying them, flounders from one fancy to another. The rest of us, bewildered by what the artist does, tend to be ever more confirmed in the belief that art is beyond the pale of normalcy. Each ends by going his own antiseptic way, convinced that art is art and life is life. The arts themselves are frequently used to strengthen the wall of separation between the artist and other people. In the mass arts-comics, movies, popular novels, magazine literature, advertising-the strangeness of the artist and his work is a favorite topic. Recent episodes of the comic strip Mary Worth are illustrative of the insistence on the difference between artists and other people. One episode, for instance, is devoted to the ridicule of modern architecture and interior decoration. Bad Woman champions this type of art, thereby establishing a connection between moral badness and modern art. One of the Sunday sequences includes a conversation between Bad Woman and Good Man, the Rugged Young American, in the course of which Good Man remarks that the room just decorated by Bad Woman seems cold. Later he turns from a picture and asks: Is this a picture? Or did the painter wipe off his brushes and frame the rag? His companion retorts, Darling! Don't be prehistoric. That's an excellent copy of a Naguchi ! Two frames later Good Man looks out of the window at Dream Girl, who, in order to stress her role of Good Girl, is pictured hanging out the wash. From sequence to sequence, the artist and the lover of modern art are portrayed as bad, queer, selfish and above all different from other