"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,