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Perhaps the best thing about all the decorations and anecdotes that clutter the scene is a sense of humor, a sense of freedom, a suspicion that anything can happen—perhaps even passion. In this welter of the current art world, it is still possible to say, or sense, that some things are good, some bad. There is the almost haunting fact that one metal glob or set of blinking lights will somehow tug at the imagination, while another will not. That Savarin coffee can full of paint brushes, which is in the Museum of Modern Art at the moment, is a visual bore. But Rauschenberg's goat with a tire around it is somehow amusing. Kienholz's latest exhibit, an abortionist's chair, complete with curette, bloody rags and fetus, has some horrid documentary interest, even if it need not be confused with El Greco's best work. Tony Smith's huge constructions have a presence (even if they are ordered by phone) that a pile of concrete blocks by Carl Andre have not. Something called Liaison, by John Bennett, has some strange charm, looming like a cross between an oversized scuba diver and a mechanical caricature of an elephant (though it's hard to see in what corner of the living room it would fit). But there is no such justification for those Euclid stairs; even as a literary joke, they are not worth the floor space they occupy, and someone ought to have the energy to say so. George Segal's plaster figures, produced by the ostensibly simple method of wrapping a subject in plaster-soaked rags, are unaccountably melancholy and powerful. Why? Modern esthetics sayeth not.
Yet it is that "why" to which today's art viewer must cling for dear life. It may be futile to insist any longer that one thing is art and another is not. Let everything be called art. But if so, it is more necessary than ever, in a time when to mention beauty has become a gaucherie, to decide that one work but not another has authority; that this one but not that one expands the senses or compels the imagination. The gallerygoer cannot stop the tastemaker from talking. But he can stop listening quite so docilely. Ultimately, art can be of value to him or to posterity only if it somehow enhances his own awareness of the world—by sight, touch or emotion—but it has to be his own decision. He has a duty to look long, learn and then judge, to like or not to like. He may make hideous mistakes. That is his risk—too few people take it—and better than abdicating personal reaction in favor of fashionable theory. For time, as today's uncertain men agree, is the only final judge; and the live viewer with his feet aching is the first voter in a poll whose results he may never know.
In the end, André Malraux expects too much when he asks for images to deny man's nothingness; that is turning art into religion. But if art need not deny the nothingness of man, it is urgent for man to deny the nothingness of art.