"no", [have no gift as a painter. I am awriter and in art I have found
mv subject.

The great pitfalls of newspaper writing are superficiality and arrogance
of tone. The time for research and checking is short, as is the time
for mulling over one's judgement.

But pitfalls also beset the art writer for glossy magazines. Addressing
himself to an elitist minority of professionals, he can lapse into arid
terminology and a scholarliness that verges on scholasticism.

I believe that writing on art should simply be good writing. The
dictum of Boileau has never dated: what is clearly thought out can be
clearly expressed.

I do not criticize by any rules. How foolish it would be to do "rules",
a fixed stance, when everything in our space age is changing at an
increasingly rapid rate. This in itself is the most difficult idea any
writer on art has to put over. Because of the magico- religious
origins of art, people cling to it as a constant amidst shifting values.
Art to them is enshrined in palaces and churches and museums.

To think of it as a process going on all around them, like trees grow-
ing or silt building up in rivers, is profoundly disturbing. The most
radical art of the present - non-permanent, non-precious and even
at times non-visible, bewilders them and arouses their ever-—latent
suspicion that the artist is making a fool of them.

It is here that the critic must intervene as interpreter. I cannot do
better on this score than to quote from Gregory Battcock's introduc-
tion to "The New Art”: "Art is humanism and reality and, as such,
cannot be seen accurately in terms of the past. At this point,
responsible criticism becomes absolutely essential. The critic has,
as itwere, to paint the painting anew and make it more acceptable,
less of the threat that it often is, It is scarcely an exaggeration to
say that the art of our time simply could not exist without the efforts

of the critic. "

IQ,