Volume 20, Number 18 · November 15, 1973
Freak Show
By Susan Sontag
Walker Evans
introduction by John Szarkowski
Museum of Modern Art, 189, 100 plates pp., $7.95 (paper)
Diane Arbus
edited and designed by Doon Arbus, by Marvin Israel
Aperture Monograph, 192, 80 illustrations pp., $9.50 (paper)
Walt Whitman tried to see beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness, importance and triviality. It seemed to him servile or snobbish to make any discriminations of value, except the most generous ones. Great claims were made for candor by our boldest, most delirious prophet of cultural revolution. Nobody would fret about beauty and ugliness, he implied, who accepted a sufficiently large embrace of the real, of the inclusiveness and vitality of actual American experience. All facts, even mean ones, are incandescent in Whitman's America—that ideal space, made real by history, where 'as they emit themselves facts are showered with light.'
Review, 6519 words
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