ABSTRACT
Western art tends to need many more indirections in achieving itself, placing more or less equal emphasis upon "things" and the relations between them. The crudeness of Jackson Pollock is not, therefore, uncouth or designed as such; it is manifestly frank and uncultivated, unsullied by training, trade secrets, finesse—a directness which the European artists he liked hoped for and partially succeeded in. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists. Kaprow's 1961 essay on happenings in Art News—then the most influential organ for contemporary art—was the first full-scale, richly illustrated presentation of the new movement. Traditional art has always tried to make it good every time, believing that this was a truer truth than life.
