The essential figure in the system is of course the artist. His is the product on which the system depends. In addition to his initiating act of production the artist has a privileged social role. The prestige of the position was earned by the Abstract Expressionists originally, by the existential and seerlike attitudes they with which they confronted a society not then ready for their art. It has continued into the ’60s, but on a changed basis: early success and media coverage give artists, or some of them, considerable control over their work, and tax problems replace money worries. One aspect of the enhanced social status of artists has been an increased attention to their words. The typical verbal form of the Abstract Expressionist generation was the statement, essentially a first person expression putting succinctly fundamental ideas about art. It is summarizing and authentic in that it originates from the same source as the art to which it relates. In the ’60s the statement was supplemented, maybe supplanted, by the interview which preserves the virtue of the first person, but on a more conversational level. (13)

On the other hand, statements and interviews both get overused, precisely because of their impeccable origins. Sources become clichés, as has happened to Pollock’s “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing” and Warhol’s machine analogy. (14) Since artists are fairly accessible and their prestige high, critics frequently make a new interview in the preparation of a catalogue or book rather than search the existing ones for complexities of intention, unnoticed details, and changes of opinion. The failure to interpret has left us with a backlog of unevaluated interviews. (15) This documentation constitutes authenticity without context. Contact with the artist can produce information of an accuracy impossible to achieve in another way, but it can also inhibit writers from taking the discussion in directions that the artists resist or have not thought of. If the critic’s interpretations are bound by the intentions of the artist, there is a corresponding neglect of comparative and historical information. The authority of the interview has the effect of freezing critical discussion of the artists at early points in their development, which is usually the time of the greatest verbalization. Marcel Duchamp has proposed that the function of the audience is to determine the meaning of the work when it is out of the artist’s hands by variable acts of “deciphering and interpreting.” (16) This is not a frivolous idea, but one that is confirmed by the history of taste and by the record of artists’ reputations. The statement and the interview are both aimed to correct this slippage of artistic intention by fixing meaning once and for all.

Artists and their works have changed less than the system by which their art is distributed. The conditions of consumption, in which one is faced with the abundance of world art, have changed more than the conditions of production. Art is still operationally what it became in the Renaissance, a situation of one-man control over an object that provides a full record of process at each stage of the work and thus permits the fullest feedback from the artist. The availability of the whole for inspection along the way combined with the crucial fact of sole authority are basic satisfactions and conveniences of painting, drawing, and some forms of sculpture. In this respect Rembrandt is not operationally different from Lichtenstein: personal decision and direct control are fundamental to both.

In connection with the early Pop art term “fine art-pop art continuum” (17) was used to describe the interconnections of cultural levels, “low” and “high,” unique or mass-produced, in nonhomogeneous groups. It included the esthetic appreciation of mass-produced goods, the appropriation of popular materials by artists (Pop art), and the mass media’s interest in art. In the ’60s, however, it became clear that the art world itself had become subject to a similar nonhierarchic connectivity. The mass media covered prominent artists or museum shows; the occasions of high culture became the subject of publicity. Abstract paintings in the House and Garden features on collectors, or the Park Place Gallery photographed with fashion models among the sculpture, are two examples. Here the works of art become a part of the lively flow of signs and symbols that populate the environment. In the case of one movement, that of European-based Op art, it was welcomed in the general press earlier and more cordially than in the art magazines. (18) Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg have both done covers for Time and Lichtenstein one for Newsweek as well. One of Robert Smithson’s earliest texts appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and the first article on earthwork, by Howard Junker, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, years before Calvin Tompkins got to it in The New Yorker.(19) The literature of art now runs copiously beyond the reviewing of exhibitions by critics as art is assimilated to the sphere of consumption. Thus there exists a general field of communication within which art has a place, not the privileged place assigned to it as humanism as time-binding symbol or moral exemplar, but as part of a spectrum of objects and messages.