Or, even more likely, we will be tempted to try to establish a new category of eccentricity as rigid as any of the traditional concepts that Mr. If this is eccentric art, we may well feel after browsing through its glossy pages, for God’s sake let us have some conformity. Perhaps-but this book will surely give active encouragement to the very tendencies he is trying to oppose. Self justified, he challenges all assumptions about what is possible, and exposes our timidities concerning the infinite capacities of man. So the eccentric master becomes newly relevant and, perhaps for the first time, even exemplary, for he is, above all, the artist hostile to all categories, outside of the “historical necessities” of tradition. Nothing so necessary to a career as a label.” Over-simplified terminology, this presumably implies, encourages the promotion of indifferent art. “Labels,” he claims, “…seem to make easy perches upon which flocks of migratory artists can light. Hess’s Preface seems to demand that we treat it with some seriousness.
If this were intended to be merely a collection of strange illustrations accompanied by brief explanatory notes, it might serve some purpose-though admittedly it is not very easy to think what.
It is also possible to have the highest regard for some of the great authorities (such as Professors Chastel, Eitner, and others) whom he has been able to call upon, while yet feeling that their talents have hardly been put to the best possible use. Hess’s complaint that journalists tend to impose a stifling categorization on the varied phenomena of modern art, while yet deploring the book (if that is the word: it is really a sort of bumper Sunday-paper color supplement) he has edited in an attempt to remedy this state of affairs.
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