The emperor's new clothes 345 Cromwell was a sort of avant-garde program of visual values. His “Ironsides” were an advance image of industrial production and weaponry. Their “Roundheads” are now the “square” citizens of the upper executive world. “Square,” of course, simply means visual and uninvolved. The transition between worlds may have occurred at the moment of the hula hoop. Mysteriously, people were fascinated by the hula hoops as an invitation to involvement and gyration, but nobody was ever seen rolling one in the approved style of the hoop and stick of yesteryear. When exhorted by their elders to roll these hoops down a walk, children simply ignored the request. An equivalent situation today is the disappearance of the word “escapism” in favor of the word “involvement.” In the twenties all popular art, whether written or photographed for the movies, was branded as pure escapism. It has not occurred to anybody to call TV viewing escapist any more than it had occurred to anybody to roll the hula hoop as though it were a wheel. Today popular art is intensely involving, and it contains none of the visual values that characterized respectable art a century ago. Popular art has indeed swamped Bohemia and enlarged its territories many times. The aesthete, 1967 model, does not affect any nineteenth-century elegance, but in the interest of involvement presents a shaggy and multisensuous image. Upon meeting him we may well be inclined to say, “You’re putting me on!” This is indeed the case. The image to which both beatnik and Beatle aspire is that of “putting on” the corporate audience. It is not a private need of expression that motivates them, but a corporate need of involvement in the total audience. This is humanism in reverse, instead of the corporate image of an integral society. The revolt against the exclusively humanistic concept of art has been long in gestation, but it first comes into visible existence in the painting of Cézanne, and Cézanne’s fundamental importance in the history of this revolution is due precisely to the fact that he was the first who dared assert that the purpose of art is not to express an ideal, whether religious or moral or humanistic, but simply to be humble before nature, and to render the forms which close observation could disentangle from vague visual impressions. The consequences of this peculiar kind of honesty were hardly such as Cézanne himself would have expected. First came cubism, and then a gradual purification of form which reached its logical conclusion in the abstract or nonfigurative art of Piet Mondrian or Ben Nicholson. This formalist type of art is now widespread among artists in every medium, and whether you like it or not, like technology it has come to stay. (Herbert Read, The Redemption of the Robot, Trident Press, 1966)