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For several centuries, in various corners of Europe, art followed the erratic course of business and trading activity. It flourished during prosperity and declined during business depressions. Under adverse economic conditions whole schools became static or extinct. Art was a product of abundance, to be enjoyed by the few who could afford it. This transformation of a work of art from a part of a social system into a luxury product exploited by wealthy individuals, has given art and the personality and tradition of the artist much of their present unearthly characteristics.
The upheavals caused by the industrial revolution upset the precarious relationships the artist had with this class. The new economic forces that came in completely changed the aspect of wealth. It developed entirely new symbols of power. The display of luxury became unnecessary.
The artists were left high and dry, abandoned without anchorage anywhere. They had lost their privileged position, and they became the misfits of society, maladjusted to the economic laws and hostile to its philosophy. 
The artists were forced to retreat to a cloistered world of their own--into a Bohemia, under cover of defiance, because they could not reconcile themselves to the new situation nor accept the prevailing philistine tastes and standards.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, an artist's greatness came to be measured not only by his ability to express the ideals and aspirations of society, but in proportion to the cultural gap that existed between him and the standards of his time. To be in tune with the times was to be condemned to mediocrity; there was no way in which an original work of art could be made to fit into the scheme of things. Artists were misunderstood, and their audience was progressively narrowed.
The artist became a peculiar spectacle, a spiritual exile, a hobo in a materialistic world, wandering about in search of enduring truth. They scorned the idea of men finding their way to a better life through politics, for they were preoccupied only with the eternal qualities which no political circumstance could alter. They believed their art could function under any form of government. 
The contradictions of this position soon became manifest. The artists had their own highly specialized set of values. The art they produced in an atmosphere of isolation became more introverted and more devoid of human meaning. They had shut themselves off from the world and now realized that they would have to find their way back into it again. They were weary of their own effeteness and longed for some direction.
At this point they put themselves into a position which would have led then straight to Fascism. They felt that a new social adjustment was imperative, but they were not in any way prepared to make a direct approach to the people. Their prejudices against the philistine mob impelled them in the opposite direction. Instead of coming down to earth, they retreated into the dead past. They looked for something authentic and they finally found it in the idea of "intellectual aristocracy." The function of this august body of dilettantes was to give the artists a criterion of values, to maintain, by their authority, a high cultural level, and to arbitrate matters
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of esthetic dispute. The artists resolved that this as the only way out of the impasse that individualism had led them into.
  They flirted with a whole variety of causes, such as Humanism, Monarchism and Medievalism in an attempt to give their social plausibility. They felt that authority and discipline could be restored once more only through a rigid hierarchical system.
dThe prevailing motive was a hatred of democracy, as the leveler of culture and the root of all evil, and a profound contempt for the masses as the despoilers of culture. these were causes artists could subscribe to and still remain aloof. They saw no paradox in the position they took against democracy. They simply argue that culture had to be concentrated in order to flourish.
  This typically Fascist idea of a large subject class dominated by a highly civilized minority was enormously popular with the esthetes of the late 'Twenties. The artists had become so anti-social that they would have been ready to accept all the tenets of Fascism, though few were aware of its implications.
  When the economic crash came, this elaborate scaffolding of ideas built upon faith in a leisure-class culture collapsed. The artists didn't really descend from their Olympian heights and their sacred illusions that they belonged to a privileged and sheltered class. Their low economic level was forced still lower. They found themselves side by side with the lowliest victims of the depression. It took more imagination than even artists possessed to cling to their illusions of grandeur, in the midst of unemployment, breadlines and bank failures, and what looked like the imminent fall of the whole economic system. We artists could see now that we would have to reach out for a more honest and more solid social relationship. 
  We were afforded a concrete example of how our old ideas worked out in real life-what a return to medievalism was like in a modern state- during the reign of terror, when the Nazis came into power in Germany. We could not remain complacent at the sight of a government persecuting its artists and sending them into exile and imprisonment. It shamed us to think how near we once came to being Fascists ourselves, and how we had cherished a belief in the choice place we would have in an established aristocracy with its perfectly balanced social hierarchies.
  We became aware of the threat of Fascism as an international menace. We could see its economic impulses operating everywhere, under the stress of economic crisis; its brutality, its racial and religious prejudices parading under the flag of reaction. We recognized it as the real enemy of culture, and we saw its portentous beginnings right here in the United States, in the violations of civil liberties, in acts of censorship and in the destruction of works of art.
We are aware that these violations of human liberties can no longer be minimized. These are not mere scarecrows invented by radical propagandists to mislead loyal Americans, but the recognizable symptoms of the incipient Fascism, increasing daily in frequency and boldness and condemned by every decent civil and religious organization in America.
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