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a widespread nostalgia for the human touch, and for the personal statement.

For so much that we live with and experience today had become devoid of personality. Objects that we handle and use are mass-produced, our clothing mass-designed. Our entertainment, in great part, must needs to be reduced to common denominators and clichés. Mass-communication has stereotyped public information, and with that the personal truth-gathering and truth-telling that we have held so essential to our well-being. Even opinion must be processed editorially before it may be relayed to the ordinary citizen.

But art is still the citadel of the individual. It is one of the few remaining outposts of free speech-unprocessed speech. The personal touch of the artist's hand remains ineradicably upon his canvas. Whatever he says or feels is communicated directly and without modification to those who look at his work.

Artists should recognize that there is no moral reason why art ought to go if it has nothing further to express. Nor is there any moral or aesthetic reason why the public should bend the knee in reverence before the mere fact of art. We might assume instead that art is important only if it essays to be important. 

If it adopts the manners and outlook and philosophy of a minor expression, then a minor expression it will be. If it aspires to an aesthetic of double-talk, just that will be its position, nothing more; and life itself will walk around it and let it alone.

Society needs more than anything else to be reminded that neither the pressure of events nor the exigencies of diplomacy can warrant the final debasement of man. We need a resurgence of the 



humanities, a rebirth of spirit. Art, because it is the innate expression of man, speaks also in final values, tends to reaffirm the individual. Art us neither use, nor appointed task; but given human compulsions, some intellectual stature and great competence, it can perhaps bring man back into focus as being of supreme importance. In which case it will have earned an honored place among the humanities. 

[[image - drawing of a man]]