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styles, it is sometimes evident without much investigation that they come from different groups within the community, as in the official academic art and the realistic art of France in 1850. A good instance of such variety rooted in social differences are the contemporaries, Chardin and Boucher, an instance already grasped in its own time. 
There is an overwhelming evidence which binds art to the conditions of its own time and place. To grasp the force of this connection we have only to ask whether Gothic sculpture is conceivable in the eighteenth century, or whether Impressionist (or better, Cubist) painting could have been produced in African tribal society. But this connection of time and place does not by itself enable us to judge what conditions were decisive and by what necessities arts have been transformed. 
But all this is past art. The modern artist will say: yes, this is true of Giotto who had to paint Madonnas because he worked for the Church. But I today take orders from no one; my art is free; what have my still life paintings and abstract designs to do with institutions or classes? He will go even further, if he has thought much about the matter, and say: yes, Giotto painted Virgins for the Church, but what has that to do with his art? The form of the work, its artistic qualities, were his personal invention; his real purpose was to make formal designs or to express his personality, and if we value Giotto today, if we distinguish him from the hundreds of others who made paintings of the same subject for the Church, it is because of his unique personality or design, which the Church certainly could not command or determine. 
If - disregarding here the question of Giotto's intentions - we ask the artist why it is then that the forms of great artists today differ from the forms of Giotto, he will be compelled to admit that historical conditions caused him to design differently than one does to-day. And he will admit, upon a little reflection, that the qualities of his forms were closely bound up with the kind of objects he painted, with his experience of life and the means at his disposal. If Giotto was superior to other painters, his artistic superiority was realized in tasks, materials, conceptions and goals, common to the artists of his immediate society, but different from our own. 
If modern art seems to have no social necessity, it is because the social has been narrowly identified with the collective as the anti-individual, and with repressive institutions and beliefs, like the church or the state or morality, to which most individuals submit. But even those activities in which the individual seems to be unconstrained and purely egoistic depend upon socially organized relationships. Private property, individual competitive business enterprise or sexual freedom, far from constituting non-social relationships, presuppose specific, historically developed forms of society. Nearer to art there are many unregistered practices which seem to involve no official institutions, yet depend on recently acquired social interests and on definite stages of material development. A promenade, for example, (as distinguished from a religious procession or a parade) would be impossible without a particular growth of urban life and secular forms of recreation. The necessary means - the streets and the roads - are also social and economic in origin, beyond
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or prior to any individual; yet each man enjoys his walk by himself without any sense of constraint or institutional purpose.
In the same way, the apparent isolation of the modern artist from practical activities, the discrepancy between his archaic, individual handicraft and the collective, mechanical character of most modern production, do not necessarily mean that he is outside society or that his work is unaffected by social and economic changes. The social aspect of his art has been further obscured by two things, the insistently personal character of the modern painter's work and his preoccupation with formal problems alone. The first leads him to think of himself in opposition to society as an organized repressive power, hostile to individual freedom; the second seems to confirm this in stripping his work of any purpose other than a purely "aesthetic."
But if we examine attentively the objects a modern artist paints and the psychological attitudes evident in the choice of these objects and their forms, we will see how intimately his art is tied to the life of modern society.
Although painters will say again and again that content doesn't matter, they are curiously selective in their subjects. They paint only certain themes and only in a certain aspect. The content of the great body of art today, which appears to be unconcerned with content, may be described as follows. First, there are natural spectacles, landscapes or city-scenes, regarded from the viewpoint of a relaxed spectator, a vacationist or sportsman, who values the landscape chiefly as a source of agreeable sensations or mood; artificial spectacles and entertainments - the theatre, the circus, the horse-race, the athletic field, the music-hall - or even works of painting, sculpture, architecture and technology, experienced as spectacles or objects of art; the artist himself and individuals associated with him; his studio and its intimate objects, his model posing, the fruit and flowers on his table, his window and the view from it; symbols of the artist's activity, individuals practising other arts, rehearsing, or in their privacy; instruments of art, especially of music, which suggest an abstract art and improvisation; isolated intimate fields, like a table covered with private instruments of idle sensation, drinking glasses, a pipe, playing cards, books, all objects of manipulation, referring to an exclusive, private world in which the individual is immobile, but free to enjoy his own moods and self stimulation. And finally, there are pictures in which the elements of professional artistic discrimination, present to some degree in all painting - the lines, spots of color, area, textures, modelling - are disengaged from things and juxtaposed as "pure" aesthetic objects.
Thus elements drawn from the professional surroundings and activity of the artist; situations in which we are consumers and spectators; objects which we confront intimately, but passively or accidentally, or manipulate idly and in isolation - these are typical subjects of modern painting. They recur with surprising regularity in contemporary art.
Modern artists have not only eliminated the world of action from their pictures, but they have interpreted past art as if the elements of experience in it, the represented object, were incidental things, pretexts of design or imposed subjects, in spite of which, or in opposition to which, the artist realized his supposedly pure aesthetic impulse. They are therefore unaware of their
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