In a closed and stable society, innovation is likely to be rather feared than welcomed; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was sometimes used as a synonym for ‘revolution’; in an open society like our own, innovation is considered a virtue. In discussing the present condition of art, I want to strip innovation of its value connotations and to consider the search for the new as an historical condition of modern art, but not one that makes it either better or worse than the more stable arts of the past. I suggest a biological metaphor as a guide: in the evolution of species, innovation is not necessarily advantageous. If the conditions of the environment are stable, it is likely that mutants in a species will be selectively eliminated. Conversely, in a changing environment, the appearance of new characters better adjusted to the new conditions will improve the adaptation of the species and be favored by the selective process.

We are often told, and it is easy to believe, that the images of abstract art are not drawn from the real world. In the most conventional view of the modern school, abstract painting is a search for free expression of the artist's own vision. The non-representational painter works as he pleases and is pleased by little that he sees. A humorous drawing in a sophisticated magazine shows a studio full of wild canvases, with the artist gazing through the window at a magnificent sunset. He says to a friend, ‘Yes, old man, I admit that it's beautiful. Sometimes I'm sorry it's not the sort of thing I do.’ Authority for the establishment of a public attitude that makes such a joke possible is to be found in the writings of many critics and in the words of artists themselves. Harold Rosenberg: ‘The big moment [in art] came when it was decided to paint—just to paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value, political, aesthetic, moral.’ André Malraux: ‘What then was painting becoming, now that it no longer imitated or transfigured? Simply—painting.’ Sheldon Cheney: ‘I cannot do better, in trying to help you to an understanding of modernism, than to point out the devastating effect the realistic movement had on the arts as a whole.‘ Piet Mondrian: ‘In order that art … should not represent relations with the natural aspect of things, the law of the denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance.’ Clive Bell: ‘Creating a work of art is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching likenesses.’ Kasimir Malevich: ‘From the supremist point of view, the appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless. … The representation of an object … is something that has nothing to do with art.’ Laurence Binyon, in 1911: ‘The theory that art is, above all things, imitative and representative, no longer holds the field with thinking minds.’ Ortega y Gasset: ‘Painting completely reversed its function and, instead of putting us within what is outside, endeavored to pour out upon the canvas what is within: ideal invented objects.’

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’.

For reasons which will appear, the problem of the avant-garde, as presented by Professors Ackerman and Kubler, has caught my interest in unexpected and, I hope, fruitful ways. Nevertheless, both on grounds of competence and because of the nature of my assignment, my present remarks are directed primarily to Professor Hafner's rapprochement of science and art. As a former physicist now mainly engaged with the history of that science, I remember well my own discovery of the close and persistent parallels between the two enterprises I had been taught to regard as polar. A belated product of that discovery is the book on Scientific Revolutions to which my fellow contributors have referred. Discussing either developmental patterns or the nature of creative innovation in the sciences, it treats such topics as the role of competing schools and of incommensurable traditions, of changing standards of value, and of altered modes of perception. Topics like these have long been basic for the art historian but are minimally represented in writings on the history of science. Not surprisingly, therefore, the book which makes them central to science is also concerned to deny, at least by strong implication, that art can readily be distinguished from science by application of the classic dichotomies between, for example, the world of value and the world of fact, the subjective and the objective, or the intuitive and the inductive. Gombrich's work, which tends in many of the same directions, has been a source of great encouragement to me, and so is Hafner's essay. Under these circumstances, I must concur in its major conclusion: ‘The more carefully we try to distinguish artist from scientist, the more difficult our task becomes.’ Certainly that statement describes my own experience.

A tendency for progress (and change, generally) to accelerate is clearly perceptible in the present epoch and has been commented upon many times. Quantitative additions to population, national income, and wealth, and other measurable indicators come larger by every decade. The number of scientifically trained persons alive in this year is much larger than the sum of all those that lived in previous generations. Revisions of even basic scientific theory occur more often than before, and the lead time between a basic invention and the blueprint for mass production grows shorter and shorter.

Possessing little knowledge or competence in either demography or economics, I am in no position to comment on the central portion of Professor Dovring's paper. Fortunately, I feel no call to do so, for I very much doubt that it can be faulted. No refinement of data or analysis is likely to set aside his basic conclusions. If the time intervals analyzed are made long enough to eliminate local fluctuations, accelerated rather than linear growth, whether of population or productive capacity, has characterized man's life on earth since at least the conquest of fire. Only historical myopia can account for the view that an increasing tempo of change dates only from the Industrial Revolution, that our current condition is, with respect to the existence of acceleration, essentially new.

The gist of Professor Kuhn's remarks seems to be a low appreciation of the role of the intellect in nonscientific technology and a high emphasis on the positive role of chance discovery.

The ‘modernizer’ is a special species of the genus ‘innovator’ and one which only in the last century has appeared in large numbers on the human scene. There have, to be sure, been groups and individuals at many moments in world history who would qualify under the definition of the modernizer which I propose to use: ‘one who seeks the transformation of his own society or segments of it in imitation of models drawn from another country or countries’. Those Japanese court officials of the seventh century who tried to remould their country on the model of T'ang China are a case in point, and one could probably find many examples on the fringes of the great empires of the past. But it is only in the last century of Western colonialism and rapid technological change that this has become a world-wide phenomenon. It is also only in the last century that the doctrine of human progress has achieved such implicit world-wide acceptance that the imitated models have been seen not simply as ‘superior’ but also as ‘more advanced’—further ahead, that is, in some imputed scale of linear progressive development. The consciousness of backwardness, the concept of underdevelopment, are relatively new.

This paper is based on certain concepts about the nature of social and cultural order and traditions. We view social and cultural traditions, first, as the major ways of looking at the basic problems of social and cultural order, and of posing the major questions about them; second, as giving various possible answers to these problems; and, third, as the organization of institutional structures for implementing different types of solutions or answers to these problems.