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In a way, science has replaced art as the art of the period, precisely because it shows no bounds. The catalogue for the 1913 Armory Show in New York, which for the first time displayed for great numbers of Americans the works of Gauguin, Cezanne and Van Gogh, announced: "Art is a sign of life. There can be no life without change, as there can be no development without change. To be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life." People believed that. The trouble was that science soon proved itself more attuned to the different and unfamiliar than did art. Perhaps in an unconscious response, artists (Capote, Mailer, et al.) became entertainers, and scientists took on the look of poets. There was poetry in outer space and in double helixes, whereas in poetry itself T.S. Eliot's Hollow Men of 1925 seemed merely to breed the self-absorption of Robert Lowell's Life Studies in 1959. Tragedy shriveled to the Death of a Salesman. Robert Conquest wrote a poem, For the 1956 Opposition of Mars, in which he exulted, "Pure joy of knowledge rides as high as art." Knowledge has seemed to ride higher.
One ought to be free of superstition, of disease, of tyrants, of boundaries, of the earth itself. One ought to be free of ignorance. In 1890 fewer than 7% of Americans aged 14 to 17 attended high school. By 1920 the number had reached one-third, by 1950 three-quarters, by 1970 nearly 90%. Whatever lay in darkness was to be illuminated. Whatever stood whole and secure was to be smashed, indeed was assumed already disintegrated in its essential form. Eliot began The Waste Land bemoaning "a heap of broken images," but wound up shoring "fragments against ruins." Since life evidently lay in pieces, perhaps it ought to remain that way. Rene Magritte drew disembodied noses and nude torsos stuffed into bottles, while Henry Moore sculpted a Two-Piece Reclining Figure, a perfect fusion of leisure and fragmentation.
From such diverse elements has formed the image of the age, at once soaring, shattered, bold, disintegrated and terrifying. The image has incorporated everything that freedom can stand for, all victories and insanities alike. How can the period that encouraged the development of the Salk vaccine have also allowed for the maraudings of the Baader-Meinhof gang? Because the spirit of these years has moved equally through killers and benefactors, each propelled by the same wind whispering the same neutral message: stability is not a natural state; nothing ought to be as it was.