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The situation has produced a new kind of patron. "Most collectors today are not just satisfied with buying art, they want to buy a piece of the artist as well," grumbles one dissenter. "They want to belong to the art world, go see dirty movies at night at Andy Warhol's apartment." And Warhol in turn becomes a feature of gossip columns and a fixture at society's tables. Any day now he may be wrapped in plaster by the plaster master, George Segal, and propped against the bar in somebody's penthouse.
The situation has also produced a new breed of critics whose function is not to enunciate or defend standards but to be explicators and publicists for the new. Rothenstein, once a champion of innovation himself, now complains: "Scarcely anything, when it is quite new, however manifestly idiotic, is forthrightly condemned." Small wonder. Past critics were thoroughly cowed and browbeaten, not unjustly, for their classic misjudgments, beginning with the scorn neaped on Manet's Olympia and culminating in the ridicule showered on the impressionists, the Fauves and the cubists. Critics now live in terror of seeming square. The trouble is, as one anticritic remarked, they are now saying more and more about less and less. That includes some museum officials who are critics as well. Describing a box by Richard Artschwaser, Ralph T. Coe of Kansas City's Nelson Gallery wrote: "The cheeselike surface of his formica triptych opens to reveal—absolutely nothing. This work reaches clear into the unlimited recesses of the mind: recesses that could frighten." Sam Hunter, critic and director of Manhattan's Jewish Museum, commented on a work by Barnett Newman, maximum leader of the minimalists; it was a large canvas, all red except for four thread-thin vertical stripes. Wrote Hunter: "These fragile and oscillating stripes play tricks on the eye and the mind by their alternate compliance and aggression. Brilliantly visible and all but subliminally lost . . . their cunning equivocation quite subverts the concepts of division and geometric partition." Sarah Lawrence Professor William Rubin said of Jasper Johns: "For him the image is meaningful in its meaninglessness."
The artists themselves do their bit. Painter Ad Reinhardt, who has so "refined" his paintings that they are currently all the same size and all look absolutely black until sufficient staring reveals an invariable cross of rectangles, is wont to make such statements as: "There is no place in art for life . . . the one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness."