“Partial, Passionate, and Political”

“Partial, Passionate, and Political”

The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience
by Harold Rosenberg
Horizon Press, 270 pp., $7.50

I praised Harold Rosenberg’s first volume of criticism (The Tradition of the New) for its variety: this new volume must be praised for its steady concentration on one subject, the crisis of society and of art. The crisis is not a new one—it has been with us for more than a hundred years and Baudelaire was its anxious prognosticator. Baudelaire is barely mentioned in The Anxious Object, but I think of him as I read this new book: it makes the same demand for a criticism that should be “partial, passionate and politica...