Our two authors have taken positive stands on contemporary art. Mr. Ackerman is clearly attached to tradition and ‘values’, and he is troubled by that episodic character of all actuality, which so disturbs the historian's view. Mr. Hafner, on the other hand, does not turn away from actuality, but he seems to smother contemporary art under a blanket comparison with science, whereby artists and scientists pursue a common enterprise in defining the ‘new reality’.