The Role of Chance in Today's Art

Extract

In recent years it has frequently been pointed out that one of the salient characteristics of contemporary art, that is, abstraction, is the fact that it is not bounded by local traditions or cultures, but has rapidly affirmed itself and spread throughout the civilized world. This phenomenon, the international quality of abstraction, it seems to me, has not yet received the attention it deserves. In general, people have contented themselves with noticing it and, according to the circumstances, either enjoying or mistrusting it. Those who see in abstraction an elevated form of culture, to which the entire human race should adhere in order to achieve a rapid ascent toward a higher common destiny, are pleased. Their opponents also judge the phenomenon from a “cultural” point of view, but they find it a typical phenomenon of mass culture, of the sort of culture that breaks up true and proper culture into utilitarian and demonically hypnotic forms. Both optimists and pessimists make the same mistake: they attribute a merely mechanistic significance to what they call culture, considering it a means of transmission and diffusion. According to them, the internationalization of abstraction is due to the simple fact that today, with television, radio, airplanes and illustrated papers, ideas and novelties travel more quickly than in the past. It would be as valid to maintain that the people of the earth have not all in turn been simultaneously Platonists or Buddhists or Christians only because Plato and Buddha and Christ could not send telegrams or grant interviews to newspapers.