"It has always been the job of artists," writes Norman Rosenthal in his grossly disingenuous essay...it would be difficult to formulate a less truthful, more wilfully distorted summary of art history, of which a small part - and by no means the most glorious - is mistaken for the whole, that the unjustifiable may be justified.
"Artists must continue the conquest of new territory and new taboos," Rosenthal continues, in prescriptive mood. He admits no other purpose of art: to break taboos is thus not a possible function of art but its only function. Small wonder, then, that if all art is the breaking of taboos, all breaking of taboos soon comes to be regarded as art.
Of course he doesn't really mean what he says; but then for intellectuals like him, words are to express propositions or truth but to distinguish the writer socially from the common heard, too artistically unenlightened and unsophisticated to advocate the abandonment of all restraint and standards...
...a taboo exists only if it is a taboo for everyone: and what is broken symbolically in art will soon enough be broken in reality.
...when respect, hatred, love, loathing, and contempt all call forth the same artistic product, then our sensibility, our power of discrimination, has been eroded out of existence.
Our Culture..., p146-8
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