Duchamp's outspoken "since the tubes of paint used by artists are manufactured and ready-made, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are ready-mades" was informed by a legitimate, felt purpose. He opposed Reality, ready-made, to art, Venus de Milo. And with the same stroke he sought to administer a purgative to a society riddled with lies for which he found a shameful counterpart in the Mona Lisa with a moustache. He generated an atmosphere of uncertainty intended to liberate the relevance of art. What has grown in the gap left by Dada's failed promise is not only the staunchness of the New Conservatives but also a dangerously pre-emptive sort of subjectivism in contemporary criticism. Here, the critic assumes that his job is to smell out the con. So what he likes he deems "real art," what he doesn't is "anti-art" or "non-art." But this means that when a certain critic goes against the grain of the general consensus and pronounces something "bad" already determined by the others to be "good," he is not only panning a specific work but he is broadcasting the fact that his colleagues have been hoodwinked, taken in by a fraud. For instance, Pauline Kael raves about Tango in Paris six months before the movie hits the country. Everybody spends six hot months panting to see the eroticism that shall change the face of cinema. No movie could live up to such a snowball of projected fantasy. So when it finally arrives and the inevitable letdown is assured, scads of critics jump on the anti-Kael bandwagon. And after a few months of their negativism, it has become radical to like the movie. By this time like or dislike has little, if anything, to do with the subject at hand.

The upshot is fear triggered in the bowels of the Cultural Establishment. And out of fear comes the wary sophisticated cool brought to the contemporary aesthetic experience--the cool so heavy with jargon-full appreciation, that self-consciously watches 'consciousness' react, that talks about 'experiencing' an art it knows not how to judge.

DOUBTLESS much of what was featured at the Whitney was undertaken in the spirit of passionate commitment to art and its future. But no one has any way of knowing that for sure. When Duchamp declared nothingness he sought to free art from the conventions and limitations that had burdened it for so long. He sought to dispell altogether the illusion of art. And if Duchamp's nihilistic assertions had been listened to the whole idea of art would long be abandoned. The idea, that is, of art as something separate from life roped off in a realm of its own, of art as responsible for bringing about a new existence through a revolution in consciousness, as something to be treasured while it mummifies in museums, as something that can accrue priceless value, or, for that matter, be bought and sold at all, and of the artist as a uniquely gifted individual. Instead the dominant assumptions about art would be that it has nothing to say, art is of no consequence, art is play, art is everywhere and anything that can be tampered with or fetishized, everybody is an artist. "Why," asks John Cage, "is a truck in a music school more musical than a truck passing by in the street?"

Cage's point is so logically descended from Dada, but it has been lost upon his public. However serious the aims of Cage and his colleagues (the Pop artists of the sixties, Happenings and Environmentalists) they were ignored as their art was readily assimilated by the public because of its novelty, because the new has come to mean the good in art.

And hand in hand with the apotheosis of the new in art came the elevation of the artist to the status of national hero, the rival of TV and movie stars as part of a culture boom that heralded American art as prestigious commodity for export. But the point of these artists was the lack of point.

Nevertheless, the Cultural Establishment persists in playing pigeon to an enemy art, an art that would subvert its reason for being. It welcomes the abuse applied to it under the name of art. It dictates old conditions for apprehending the new in art. And then, under a front of generous tolerance, it feeds its own preeminence. But what an empty, empty game it plays.