ABSTRACT
HOBBES, IN HIS QUIRKY LEXICON OF feelings, defines laughter as “sudden glory”—a thought so pungent and abrupt as nearly to illustrate itself. Sudden glory is made objective and palpable in the assembled work of Red Grooms, and it is this quality to which one immediately responds as the elevator opens onto the fourth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, given over entirely to this artist's singular clownerie. And since in the precincts of high art the generosity of the clown, bent on the sudden instillation of glory in his viewers is so rare a virtue, it is worth dilating for a moment on the moral psychology of the artistic goof, a role Grooms has chosen as a way to mediate between audience and reality.
