Art or Anarchy?

Art or Anarchy?  How the Extremists and Exploiters Have Reduced the Fine Arts to Chaos and Commercialism by Huntington Hartford, 196 pages

This 1964 book by the playboy founder of New York's Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art presents a bleak view of an art world that has slid deep into solipsism and meaninglessness, a collapse Hartford attributes primarily to the abandonment of the subject.  As he saw it, this was enabled and exacerbated by the increasing commercialization of fine art in the first half of the twentieth century.  Although the result may be an art reflective of its time, it signally fails to transcend its time.

Hartford's book is a free-ranging polemic which includes extensive discussions of the peccadilloes of great artists and the subversive influence of the KGB in the Western art scene.  This has its advantages - Hartford is unafraid of making enemies - but these are far outweighed by the lack of focus and gossipy malodor.