That this divorce between the artist and his public--this dislocation of
the right and natural relations between them--has taken place is
certain. The causes of it are many and deep-lying in our modern
civilization, and I can point out only a few of the more obvious ones.

The first of these is the emergence of a new public. The art of past
ages had been distinctively an aristocratic art, created for kings and
princes, for the free citizens of slave-holding republics, for the
spiritual and intellectual aristocracy of the church, or for a luxurious
and frivolous nobility. As the aim of the Revolution was the
destruction of aristocratic privilege, it is not surprising that a
revolutionary like David should have felt it necessary to destroy the
traditions of an art created for the aristocracy. In his own art of
painting he succeeded so thoroughly that the painters of the next
generation found themselves with no traditions at all. They had not only
to work for a public of enriched bourgeois or proletarians who had never
cared for art, but they had to create over again the art with which they
endeavored to interest this public. How could they succeed? The rift
between artist and public had begun, and it has been widening ever
since.

If the people had had little to do with the major arts of painting and
sculpture, there had yet been, all through the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, a truly popular art--an art of furniture making, of
wood-carving, of forging, of pottery. Every craftsman was an artist in
his degree, and every artist was but a craftsman of a superior sort. Our
machine-making, industrial civilization, intent upon material progress
and the satisfaction of material wants, has destroyed this popular art;
and at the same time that the artist lost his patronage from above he
lost his support from below. He has become a superior person, a sort of
demi-gentleman, but he has no longer a splendid nobility to employ him
or a world of artist artisans to surround him and understand him.

And to the modern artist, so isolated, with no tradition behind him, no
direction from above and no support from below, the art of all times and
all countries has become familiar through modern means of communication
and modern processes of reproduction. Having no compelling reason for
doing one thing rather than another, or for choosing one or another way
of doing things, he is shown a thousand things that he may do and a
thousand ways o