Art: Tribute from Abroad

“The American imagination has become the most powerful stream of Western thought and culture,” declared London’s Times Literary Supplement last week in a weighty (28 articles) survey of U.S. culture. The U.S. architecture is “poetic, structural, febrile.” Abstract art now powerfully expresses U.S. imagination—”sometimes grotesque, often naive, but never pale, never passive.” Realism, by contrast, seems now “like a political party defeated in a landslide.” As for U.S. patrons: “No social group in history has been so willing to spend money on the arts and sciences.”