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in the streets was deprived of any revolutionary
content by the fact that it was usually incom-
prehensible and alienating to the people “out
there,” no matter how fashionably downwardly
mobile it might be in the art world. The idea
that if art is subversive in the art world it will
automatically appeal to a general audience now
seems absurd.

The whole evolutionary basis of modernist
innovation, the idea of esthetic “progress,” the
“I-did-it-first” and “it’s-been-done-already” syn-
dromes which pervade contemporary avant-
garde art and criticism, are also blatantly class-
ist, and have more to do with technology than
with art. To be “avant-garde” is inevitably to be
on top or to become upper-middle-class, be-
cause such innovations take place in a context
accessible only to the educated elite. Thus
socially conscious artists working in or with
community groups and muralists try to dis-
associate themselves from the art world, even
though its values (“quality”) remain to haunt
them personally.

The value systems are different in and out of
the art world, and anyone attempting to strad-
dle the two develops another kind of schizo-
phrenia. For instance, in the inner-city com-
munity murals, as Eva Cockcroft points out else-
where in this publication, the images of woman
are the traditional ones—a beautiful, noble
mother and housewife or worker, and a re-
bellious young woman striving to change her
world —both of them celebrated for their cour-
age to be and to stay the way they are and to
support their men in the face of horrendous

odds. This is not the art-world or middle-class.

“radical” view of future feminism, nor is it one
which radical feminists hoping to “reach out”
across the classes can easily espouse. Here, in
the realm of aspirations, is where upward and
downward mobility and status quo clash, where
the economic class barriers are established. As
Michele Russell has noted,? the Third-World
woman is not attracted to the “Utopian experi-
mentation” of the left (in the art world, the
would-be Marxist avant-garde) or to the “prag-
matic opportunism” of the right (in the art
world, those who reform and co-opt the
“radicals”).

Many of the subjects touched on here come
back to Taste. To a poor woman, art, or a beau-
tiful object, might be defined as something she
cannot have. Beauty and art have been defined
before as the desirable. In a consumer society,
art too becomes a commodity rather than a:life-
enhancing experience. Yet the Van Gogh repro-
duction or the pink glass swan—the same
beautiful objects that may be “below” a middle-
class woman (because she has, in moving up-
ward, acauired upper-class taste, or would like
to think she has)—may be “above” or inacces-
sible to a welfare mother. The phrase ““to dictate
taste” has its own political connotations. A

Minneapolis worker interviewed by students of
artist Don Celender said he liked “old art works
because they’re more classy,”* and class does
seem to be what the traditional notion of art is
all about. Yet contemporary avant-garde art, for
allits attempts to break out of that gold frame, is
equally class-bound, and even the artist aware
of these contradictions in her/his own life and
work is hard-put to resolve them. It’s a vicious
circle. If the artist/producer is upper-middle-
class, and our standards of art as taught in
schools are persistently upper-middle-class,
how do we escape making art only for the
upper-middle-class?

The alternatives to “quality,” to the “high” art
shown in art-world galleries and magazines
have been few, and for the most part unsatis-
fying, although well-intended. Even when
kitsch, politics or housework are absorbed into
art, contact with the real world is not neces-
sarily made. At no time has the avant garde,
though playing in the famous “gap between art
and life,” moved far enough out of the art con-
text to attract a broad audience —that audience
which has, ironically, been trained to think of
art as something that has nothing to do with life
and, at the same time, tends only to like that art
which means something in terms of its own life,
or fantasies. The dilemma for the leftist artist in
the middle class is that her/his standards seem
to have been set irremediably. No matter how
much we know about what the broader public
wants, or needs, it is very difficult to break
social conditioning and cultural habits. Hope-
fully, a truly feminist art will provide other
standards.

To understand the woman artist’s position in
this complex situation between the art world
and the real world, class and gender, it is neces-
sary to know that in America artists are rarely
respected unless they are stars or rich or mad or
dead. Being an artist is not being “somebody.”
Middle-class families are happy to pay lip ser-
vice to art but god forbid their own children
take it so seriously as to consider it a profession.
Thus a man who becomes an artist is asked
when he is going to “go to work,” and he is not-
so-covertly considered a child, a sissy (a wom-
an), someone who has a hobby rather than a
vocation, someone who can’t make money and
therefore cannot hold his head up in the real
world of men—at least until his work sells, at
which point he may be welcomed back. Male
artists, bending over backward to rid them-
selves of this stigma, tend to be particularly
susceptible to insecurity and machismo. So
women daring to insist on their place in the
primary rank —as art makers rather than as art
housekeepers (curators, critics, dealers, “pa-
trons”)—inherit a heavy burden of male fears in
addition to the economic and psychological