To the Editors:

The New York art world has been eroding rapidly. Brutal exhibitionism (the artist as a superstar), commercialism, and vulgarity have become commonplace. Ill-educated amateurs have achieved positions of power in many museums as well as in the private galleries. Above all art has divorced itself from literature and reason. “Words and pictures” as defined by Meyer Schapiro no longer exists except in silly and puerile ways.

I have just begun publishing a new quarterly called Parenthèse in an effort to bring the so-called “two cultures” together (they were never apart). Perhaps your readers would be interested in knowing about it. It is “elitist” pro-intellectual, “high-brow”; it is anti-journalism, reviewing and gossip. In short like Husserl we want to [bracket] what we can of what’s left.

John Bernard Myers

Parenthèse

59 East 73 St.

New York, NY 10021

This Issue

July 17, 1975