Volume 3, Number 9 · December 17, 1964
Action Critic
By Wylie Sypher
The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience
by Harold Rosenberg
Horizon, 270 pp., $7.50
Nietzsche predicted that when science reached the limits of its logic it would curl about to bite its own tail, forcing the scientist back upon the only remedy—art. What Nietzsche did not foresee is that the artist, too, would reach the limits of art, which would then, in turn, curl about to bite its own tail, as it now does in New York, where the demand for the new is always forcing the painter beyond the limits of his logic. Nietzsche was ignorant of our 'speedup in history-making,' one of the pressures analyzed by Jacques Ellul in his recent book on The Technological Society and its permanent revolution. These pressures are nowhere more imperative than in New York, the arena where the new is immediately submerged in 'the next wave of novelty' before it can be appraised. Or, as Harold Rosenberg remarks, the new is established as a fact before it can be validated as art.
Review, 2276 words
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