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The uneasy public feeling that some of contemporary art just has to be a put-on is not without reason, as the artists themselves point out. Says Los Angeles Sculptor Edward Keinholz, whose own "environments" of Nevada brothels and backstairs abortion rooms have raised plenty of eyebrows: "In a culture as rich as ours, art gets bastardized. Pop artists had a keen thing going until they let the dealers in. As a result, the span of life for pop art has been cut in half." With hundreds of sec ond-rate artists now trying to cash in, Millionaire Collector John Powers warns: "It is easy to be deluded by camp followers. The public is buying a lot of bad copies of truly creative work."
Bubbling & Expanding. As the fads rush by and art breaks out of its traditional boundaries, the public whose taste was formed earlier finds itself hard pressed. As Lady Bird Johnson remarked recently, while viewing a Roy Lichtenstein drawing: "I have friends who like it, own it, get excited about it. I keep trying." People who want a little peace and quiet in their art, Mrs. Peter Hurd said last week, are the ones who prefer the work of her brother, Andrew Wyeth. "He's probably painting the remnants of a simpler life," she admitted, and wondered if it was not his art, but the time, that has grown out of joint.
What keeps the art market bubbling and galleries expanding is that, for all the confusion, art is being bought. Some people buy it because they honestly want to learn to understand it, some because it is fashionable—some because it is fun. "Art is one of the ways to find out what it's all about," maintains Collector Scull. "The art world is live ly now," says Painter Jasper Johns. "People sense this, and wish to be involved with something that's lively."
Soup-Can Glasses. That the scene is lively, Tony Smith certainly agrees. While no pop art collector himself, he still thinks its cheerful acceptance has added yeast to the ferment. "It has helped art move from a private scene to a public scene," he points out. "In an odd way, the people who supported pop contributed to this by living public lives through mass media. We got to see their collections in magazines; they were talked about in the press, on TV. Their lives became public, and it made the general public much more aware of art and artists."
That much of the artistic fallout into fashion and decor—from op dresses and psychedelic posters to Andy Warhol soup-can glasses and kitchen design—is by nature transitory does not bother him. Using art as home decoration, he argues, "gives it a broader base." Nor is he overly moved by critics such as Clement Greenberg, who laments that too-happy acceptance of the new has killed the tradition of the avantgarde. Greenberg complains that the days of the great innovators are gone, that pop, op and minimal are not true avant-garde art, but merely "novelty art." The only thing that can save high art, he continues, is long periods of gestation. What's needed is for the "larger art public to stop breathing down its neck." In Smith's case, however, the argument is academic—because he has already spent some 30 years, in a manner of speaking, gestating.