Last night I was reading Leo Steinberg's great essay (in "Other Criteria") called "Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public," in which Steinberg sides with the "public" and challenges the idea that anyone who doesn't immediately cotton to the new is a philistine. He points to the fact that it has often been artists who don't like new art: Signac hated Matisse's Joy of Life, Matisse hated Picasso's Demoiselles, the poet Baudelaire hated both Ingres and Courbet, those polar figures.

May we not then drop this useless, mythical distinction between—on one side—creative, forward-looking individuals whom we will call artists, and—on the other side—a sullen, anonymous, uncomprehending mass, whom we call the public?

In other words, my notion of the public is functional. The word "public" for me does not designate any particular people; it refers to a role played by people, or to a role into which people are thrust or forced by a given experience. And only those who are beyond experience should be exempt from the charge of belonging to the public.

As to the "plight"—here I mean simply the shock of discomfort, or the bewilderment or the anger or the boredom which some people always feel, and all people sometimes feel, when confronted with an unfamiliar new style.

...I know that there are people enough who are quite genuinely troubled by those shifts that seem to change the worth of art. And this should give to what I call "The Plight of the Public" a certain dignity. There is a sense of loss, of sudden exile, of something willfully denied—sometimes a feeling that one's accumulated culture or experience is hopelessly devalued, leaving one exposed to spiritual destitution. And this experience can hit an artist even harder than an amateur.

Stein then goes through an incredible description of his first, doubting interaction with Jasper Johns's Target with Four Faces, in which he tries to tease out his own reactions, make sense of them, and then question whether they're "designed to demonstrate something about myself or are they authentic experience?" I can't think of a better written demonstration of what happens in the mind of a critic, the loops back and forward and the doubts, and how most of us (me definitely included) often simply fail to get this process down on paper.

Steinberg ends with an inspiring call to action involving Johns, Baudelaire, manna from heaven, and more. You have to read the whole thing. But here's a bit.

Like Kierkegaard's God, the work molests us with its aggressive absurdity, the way Jasper Johns presented himself to me several years ago. It demands a decision in which you discover something of your own quality; and this decision is always a "leap of faith," to use Kierkegaard's famous term. And like Kierkegaard's God, who demands a sacrifice from Abraham in violation of every moral standard; like Kierkegaard's God, the picture seems arbitrary, cruel, irrational, demanding your faith, while it makes no promise of future rewards. In other words, it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public, artists included, should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.

The important thing, as I read it, is not that you always get to liking what you're looking at—not that everything you look at becomes a Johns. But that you do not stop looking at "original contemporary art" nevertheless. That you keep looking is all.

There is another question I have in all this: If we think of the "public" as a role, then what do we make of "public art"? Which established values do our public artworks hold up, reassuring us? Is a work of public art successfully "public" if it violates this standard by becoming "original contemporary art," to use Steinberg's term? Is this why it has never been quite possible for a real criticism to spring up around public art?

And lastly, I wonder how the comments thread will play out these ideas...