>What can I say? That is a great essay, Louis. Allow me to add whatever I
>can.
Doyle It was an interesting essay, but fails to really show anything much about why AE happened when it did. The association of AE to some Trotskyist has the same problem that Jim Heartfield brought up about Terry Eagleton's remarks on Dickens. Thanks Jim for the inspiration.
Doyle Throughout a century of competition with photography, art work and income in painting that had been realist dried up. There was a crisis for realist painting in terms of income for the average person trying to earn a living doing painting. Mechanical methods couldn't do abstract art at the time in a free manner like painting. A flood of European refugees who had already switched over to abstraction and especially contingency and chance happenings in art put a lot of pressure on the orthodox view of what art is supposed to do. Clement Greenberg was a good essayist, perhaps Louis is comparable in a polemic sense, but Greenberg's ideas about AE and what the purpose of doing abstraction failed to meant the standards of time. So there isn't a sense in the AE theory and practice to understand for instance why pop art came up to supplant AE. Or why kitsch art in the 1980's was the mode of New York. In fact if you look at AE while there is a some apolitical sense in AE that was true too in the beat poets. Yet the beats were central figures against the Vietnam war later on.
Doyle Finally we have the European example of Picasso, a communist who arose in Europe before WWI. There was no Trotskyist ideological conflict with communist over the direction of culture then. That would suggest to me that Trotskyist were aware of fashions that were ubiquitous in the forties and fifties, as well as most of the left would have been, and commented within the limits of their views upon the prevailing currents of their time. It is good not to lose historical details, but not good to give too much influence over to what was periferal in terms of the forces that probably really shaped art. regards, Doyle