Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

A single sentence sufficed to seal my veneration for Harold Rosenberg. It comes in the midst of the bravura conclusion of “The Intellectual and His Future,” an essay from 1965. “One does not possess mental freedom and detachment,” it reads, “one participates in them.” Here was a dictum worthy of adoption as a creed. “Intellectual” is not a title, an honorific, or a job description. It is a daily aspiration. Rosenberg is remembered, if he is remembered at all, as one of the leading American art critics of the twentieth century, the coiner of the term “action painting” to describe the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and other Abstract Expressionists, and it was for that reason, several years ago, that I turned to his work. What I discovered was not an art critic but a full-spectrum intellectual who thought about art. He also thought about poetry, politics, theater, fiction, society, sociology, Marx, Marxism, Judaism, the media, and the nature of the intellectual himself.  And he did it all better than just about anyone I had ever encountered. He was Trilling without the solemnity, Kazin with a wider, more ironic mind (to name two earlier infatuations among the New York intellectuals). His point of view was comic in the deepest sense. An outsider by temperament as well as conviction, he looked at everything from the outside, accepting nothing — no movement, no figure, no social fiction, no educated formula — at its own estimation. His most potent rhetorical weapon was satire — the whiff of caricature, the gust of common sense. “Far from being goaded to their parts by police agents hidden in the wings”—this in reference to the vogue of self-confession among postwar ex-radicals — “the guilty here had to force their way onto the stage. [Whitaker] Chambers himself, that witness of witnesses…describes how close he came to breaking under the ordeal of getting the notice of people whose vital interests he was determined to defend.” But Rosenberg wasn’t merely a debunker. He believed in things: in art, in the struggle to come to terms with reality, in the individual. He was skeptical of “thought,” but he believed in thinking.  Other intellectuals saw through collective illusions. Rosenberg saw through the illusions of other intellectuals. The criticism of kitsch art or popular culture, a highbrow hobby in the new age of mass entertainment, was nothing, he wrote, but another form of kitsch — kitsch ideas. “There is only one way to quarantine kitsch: by being too busy with art.” Notions of the “other-directed” “organization man,” promulgated in the 1950s as descriptions of the new American type (and clichés of thought to this day), were in reality projections, he explains, on the part of the new caste of intellectual placemen who were swarming the postwar bureaucracies. “Today Orgmen reproduce themselves like fruit flies in whatever is organized, whether it be a political party or a museum of advanced art.” As for “alienation,” that great midcentury bugaboo and talking point, not only does Rosenberg not deplore it, he sees it as a virtue, a failure “to participate emotionally and intellectually in the fictions and conventions of mass culture.” He was fearless in the face of reputation. T.S. Eliot (then at his zenith), having made an idol of “tradition,” had led American poetry into a cul-de-sac of academicism. 1984, all but sacred at the time, was marked by “frigid rationality and paranoiacally lifeless prose.” Auden and Spender, darlings of the cultural left for their politically “responsible” poetry, avoided responsibility for individual experience and social reflection alike. “When I first encountered the gravity of Lionel Trilling,” Rosenberg writes, “I did not get the joke; it took some time to realize that there wasn’t any.” Upon his death in 1978, Hilton Kramer, the chief art critic of the New York Times and himself a prominent figure in intellectual New York, eulogized him as “the quintessential New York intellectual.” For the essayist Seymour Krim, reflecting on the same occasion, Rosenberg had been the most intelligent critic writing in English. As for his physical presence, Krim reported, “Harold looked and shone like the Lion of Judah. He was about 6’4,” a really heroic-looking prince among the bookish