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IT is COMMON KNOWLEDGE that art wears many masks—indeed, that these masks which an puts on to enact its individual dramas are not nice decorations but part and parcel of its essential make-up; art criticism, unfortunately, wears many more masks than its historical predecessor—and often far less conscionably and pleasingly. Art criticism, despite the protests of a few art and literary critics, is an ancillary activity to the artistically creative activity. Such an observation follows only the dictates of common sense: there was no art criticism, of any kind, before Plato and Aristotle; however, art itself has flourished, in more or less conscious form, since the Aurignacian-Perigordian period.
Essentially, art criticism is a concomitant—an increasingly complex one, as we trace it through its history—of man's historical development of a Weltanschauung. (The latter part of this statement is a bit of a tautology because ‘history’ itself is an impossible notion without some sort of an at least seminally articulated Weltanschauung; historical conceptions of man's relation to man, then, are epiphenomenal to his developing conception of man's relation to the universal order. The creation of this notion of the ‘universal order’, is, of course, a necessarily simultaneous construct.) Man's motivation in creating such a world-view involved a complex of factors: 1, a leisure-class boredom with mundane and sub-mental phenomena; 2, a natural curiosity about aspects of man's peculiar nature which could be noticed and thus found susceptible to study only in such an environmental and existential situation; 3, this Weltanschauung development, when it had been made explicit—that is, ‘literarized’, was not a similar product of man's