It resolutely assails the more orthodox critics for what they say about all the moderns it likes and then it echoes their language in its own condemnation of a body of men who are striving earnestly in their way to do things.
“Oh! tolerance, oh! progress!
Oh! twentieth century!”
One has only to group the conflicting opinions of great painters and critics to see how much depends upon the point of view and the personal equation.
To say certain pictures are worthless is a matter of individual taste and judgment; they may be worthless to me and not to you, just as clothes one man likes another would refuse to wear.
But to say a school or a movement, irrespective of particular works, is a worthless movement involves not one’s taste but one’s philosophy of life; it involves the proposition that a movement in art that challenges the attention of the art-world is so devoid of force of any kind that it is unworthy attention—an obvious contradiction.
Cubism has produced a lot of inane, uninteresting, and ugly pictures, pictures hopelessly bad in both line and color, but it has also produced pictures that are fine in line and color; but whether a particular picture is good or bad is of no importance whatsoever in comparison with the larger and more vital question:
What is the relation of Cubism to the art of today and tomorrow?