“In a capitalist country fun is everything. Fun is the only justification for the acquisitive impulse, if one is to be honest. (The Romans were honest, they thought it was all girls, grapes and snow.) The Guggenheim Museum is fun, and as such it justifies itself. Abstract expressionism is not, and its justifications must be found elsewhere. Not to say it as justification, but simply as fact, abstract expressionism is the art of serious men. They are serious because they are not isolated. So out of this populated cavern of self come brilliant, uncomfortable works, works that don’t reflect you or your life, though you can know them. Art is not your life, it is someone else’s. Something very difficult for the acquisitive spirit to understand, and for that matter the spirit of joinership that animates communism. But it’s there.”—
Frank O’Hara, Art Chronicle I (via gloomy-planets)
OK this is nice and everything but didn’t the CIA fund abstract expressionism as part of their culture war against communism? And I mean really, how on earth can you distance high art from “the acquisitive spirit”? There are few things more exemplary of acquisitiveness than the art market.