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To the Rescue of Art: Twenty-Six Essays

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With this essays in this book, Arnheim discusses art as art, or rather what makes art. One of his theses is that much of the blame for the current decline of art and of art and literary criticism lies with the fin de siecle mood of the general culture, but much of it lies with those who are supposed to be critics.

Many critics, and unfortunately teachers, subscribe to the belief that the criteria by which a work of art deserves to be held in aesthetic and social esteem no longer exist. Thus, one can hardly blame people for arguing that art is anything they chooses to call it if the very people who are supposed to supply the standards by which to judge what is and is not art assert that any kind of objective criteria no longer exist.

On the other hand, artists are always exploring and innovating. But exactly for this reason, critics should discuss what makes art art. It is too easy to indulge in the easy pleasures of relativism just as it is too easy to answer with smug, superior expressions when people ask what is meant by art.

The solution to rescuing the arts consists in discrimination, once the penultimate critical faculty, in pointing out the common core of sensory expression in all its manifestations-what William James calls the "sifting of human creations." What critics need to do is revive and explore the principles of which all productive functioning of the arts is based. As Arnheim states: "If art is indispensable as a psychological, and possibly a biological, requirement of existence, it must be assumed to grow from the very depths of our being. And if so, these roots must be traceable. Therefore, critics must be heralds of the principles they are retrieving."

But, do not be put off by the political nature of this review. Arnheim is not a polemicist. The majority of the book is devoted to what he states critics need do: discuss art as art, not art as politics. And he does that very well.