But what are these standards? How do you get them? How do you know they’re the right ones? How can you make a clear pattern out of so many intangibles, including that greatest one, the very private I?
Well for one thing, it’s fairly obvious that the more you read and see and hear, the more equipped you’ll be to practice that art of association which is at the basis of all understanding and judgment. The more you live and the more you look, the more aware you are of a consistent pattern — as universal as the stars, as the tides, as breathing, as night and day — underlying everything. I would call this pattern and this rhythm an order. Not order — an order. Within it exists an incredible diversity of forms. Without it lies chaos — the wild cells of destruction — sickness. It is in the end up to you to distinguish between the diversity that is health and the chaos that is sickness, and you can’t do this without a process of association that can link a bar of Mozart with the corner of a Vermeer painting, or a Stravinsky score with a Picasso abstraction; or that can relate an aggressive act with a [F— K—] painting and a fit of coughing with a [J— C—] composition.
There is no accident in the fact that certain expressions of art live for all time and that others die with the moment, and although you may not always define the reasons, you can ask the questions. What does an artist say that is timeless; how does he say it? How much is fashion, how much is merely reflection? Why is Sir Walter Scott so hard to read now, and Jane Austen not? Why is baroque right for one age and too effulgent for another?
Can a standard of craftsmanship apply to art of all ages, or does each have its own, and different, definitions? You may have been aware, inadvertently, that craftsmanship has become a dirty word these years because, again, it implies standards — something done well or done badly. The result of this convenient avoidance is a plenitude of actors who can’t project their voices, poets who can’t communicate emotion, and writers who have no vocabulary — not to speak of painters who can’t draw. The dogma now is that craftsmanship gets in the way of expression. You can do better if you don’t know how you do it, let alone what you’re doing.
I think it is time you helped reverse this trend by trying to rediscover craft: the command of the chosen instrument, whether it is a brush, a word, or a voice. When you begin to detect the difference between freedom and sloppiness, between serious experimentation and egotherapy, between skill and slickness, between strength and violence, you are on your way to separating the sheep from the goats, a form of segregation denied us for quite a while. All you need to restore it is a small bundle of standards and a Geiger counter that detects fraud, and we might begin our tour of the arts in an area where both are urgently needed: contemporary painting.
I don’t know what’s worse: to have to look at acres of bad art to find the little good, or to read what the critics say about it all. In no other field of expression has so much double-talk flourished, so much confusion prevailed, and so much nonsense been circulated: further evidence of the close interdependence between the arts and the critical climate they inhabit. It will be my pleasure to share with you some of this double-talk so typical of our times.