Brett Olson

Eero Saarinen as the “Gateway to the West” in St. Louis, Missouri.

Mass media took away the political speech of art. When Picasso painted Guernica, regular TV broadcasting had been in existence for only a year in England and nobody in France, except a few electronics experts, had seen a television set.

for Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, who fought in Flanders, or for László Moholy-Nagy.

We know the names of some artists who died: among the painters, Umberto Boccioni, Franz Marc, and

Grosz and Heartfield, as line soldiers during the war, would also send one another postcards on which they had made small, satirical montages whose point, not being verbal, was easily overlooked by the military censors.

Brancusi ignored Expressionism by asserting that a stone could be as full of meaning as anything it might be made to represent. His attitude would have been understood at once in Japan, where a whole cultural context deriving from Buddhism lay ready for it: and in fact it was not a European but a Japanese-American named Isamu Noguchi (b. 1904) who,

work accumulates “value” and becomes, ipso facto, harmless. As far as today’s politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.

their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must be in a mass media society where art’s principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion.

The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose. This touches upon questions of copyright for reproduction, the ownership of art presses and publishers, the total policy of public art galleries and museums. As usually