Nonrepresentational art has never succeeded in obliterating the art of interpreting the visible and imagined realities of our existence: man, his objects and actions, his dreams, and the natural world in which he lives, but it has entrenched itself as though never to be dislodged; it is now as normal a part of artistic routine as mathematical perspective used to be, and a glance at airports, office buildings, and bars proves that it has become downright popular. Historians of later ages, whether they choose to call it a culmination or an aberration, will certainly pick it as the most distinctive manifestation of artistic life in our century. Never"theless, the ideology of abstract art continues to be challenged. Dissident artists attack it most effectively by working under other standards. Those of us who merely reflect help as best we can with theoretical considerations—one or two of which I submit in what follows.

To impeach nonrepresentational art, the gravest charge against it must be its failure to engage what I shall deliberately and even ostentatiously call the moral interest. For the best part of a century, intellectuals have been speaking, writing, and acting as if their sophisticated aesthetic perceptions were quite uninfluenced by moral considerations, and as if moral considerations were a sort of mental function suitable only for right-wing patriots. But have we not by now travelled far enough from the 19th century to take the ineradicable realities of our moral life—the moral life even of a disabused art critic—back into the aesthetic arena? Modern criticism has closed its eyes to the moral element in our aesthetic response simply because so very few serious works of art offend the moral persuasions of modern critics. If we were flooded with ambitious art-works (pictorial or literary) favoring the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi revival, a return to fundamentalist Christianity, or even laissez-faire capitalism, most of our critics would instantly show their true colors, clamber down from their cool critical summits (is not "cool" the proper word for modern criticism today?) and man the barricades of Moral Passion. In short, whether we know it or not, overtly or covertly, we are always moralizing, moralizing in life, and moralizing in art, even when we think we are responding only to masses, rhythms, and colors.