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reason of the overhead expense and general maintenance, confined to small and cramped stuck-away quarters. He is compelled to curtail his exhibitions. His as well as the artists' activities and genuine ambitions are stifled and their programs minced and hectic. The palatial spacious day-lit galleries in prominent cosmopolitan centers are for the great dead and the masters of old. 

The comedian, the holligan, the wise-crack has an audience in the millions upon millions every hour, every day. The reason for this is simple and obvious. The joker is the novocaine in the struggle and agony of the daily existence of the great multitude. Indirectly he sells all sorts of trash, and announces tainted news and fraudulent commodities. 

Compare the number of art lectures, art courses and publications, the number of art schools, with the carloads of pulp, variety and sex magazines and the bulk of the Sunday newspapers, the funnies, the radio propaganda of tooth-paste, hair tonic, cereals, macaroni and shoe polish, and the cheap, lewd movies, the pool-rooms and other demoralizing institutions.

Why, with so many vacant skyscraper lofts, armories and other spacious unoccupied and centrally located buildings, should artists be driven to show their work and offer it for sale on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village? What impression can such a showing make on even the most sympathetic and understanding spectator? Pictures guillotined on iron railings, tossed by the wind, soiled by the dust and shouted out, as it were, by harsh out-of-door lighting; the grandest work of art would be mightily dimmed and its glow tarnished and cheapened, placed under similar conditions. These open-air art marts, while received good-naturedly, nevertheless call to mind the horror and sadness of the scenes of evictions in the slums. 

High-domed edifices, veritable palaces in size and proportion, called banks, are built in the hundreds of thousands all over the land, or marble, granite, glass and brass for the mere counting of pennies and pieces of green paper, called money; for the housing in their cellars of military forts called safes, and a few desks and counters with clerks that look like ants in these vacant, space-wasted interiors, while art exhibitions, lectures, and musicals, with few exceptions, are relegated to improvised, dingy, cramped interiors.

Then we have the annual Independent Artists' Exhibition. Another makeshift. At such unimpressive, temporary exhibition places, the yellow journals and their reporters find it expedient and easy to display, or give vent to their cheap vulgar wit at the expense of the bewildered, beaten and dispossessed artist and art student. 

We do not seek the 57th Street gallery, robed in royal purple plush and trimmed with modern chromium, furnished with wrought-iron lamps and cushioned lounges. You don't see the staid art dealers display their pictures on iron railings, on dilapidated stoops, or in doorways over ash-cans. No! They must have their plush, shaded light, uniformed attendants like Pullman porters, little hot-house evergreens, tropical plants in private nooks and cosy corners. A hushed atmosphere, a sanctimonius, ecclesiatical environment, engraved catalogues with introductions and forewords by French critics for greater prestige, a stamp of imported goods from abroad- such surroundings are more conducive to the sale of their wares to the industrial magnates.

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In these palatial, life-lacking galleries, the art critics enters with humility and reverence. He is awed. A two or three column articles with 6-inch square illustrations, headlines, captions follow. He is eloquent in his praise of the foreign and the dead, although truly bored and nagged with having to write and rewrite on the same subjects season after season. These grand, staid merchants of art have a special genius for resurrecting the dead and know how to keep the dead living. Only the profit system can breed such commercial wizards, parasites and opportunities. What chance have we? Where and how shall the living find an audience?

In the beginning of his or her career the artist is advised to make connec-tions. We keep on connecting all our lives, and in the end most of us find ourselves connected with the poorhouse.

Still other and perhaps as grave impediments that tend to widen the gap between artist and audience are the million high-sounding manifestos of the countless prophets of the isms, the sly and copious self-appointed impressarios, the art-healers, art benefactors that confuse, antagonize and in the end repel an audience.

An outstanding factor that must be considered in an effort to augment the artists' audience is the perplexing question of subject matter as influenced and colored by the new social consciousness which, I believe, will be solved naturally through closer ties between artists and the steadily growing class conscious proletarian population. Subject matter expressing and revealing the life, poetry and power inherent in the great toiling, awakening masses. 

To achieve this we should reject and ignore idle intellection, dogma, sophistication and affectation or purity and naiveté.
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