This catalogue has excellent photographs that gives one a sense of the attitude of the Beat Generation. Everyone is familiar with the writers of the period, but not everyone knows about art generated during those years. This catalogue gives a review of art, film, and writing being created at the time. Not only that but it devotes a chapter to women and a chapter to minorites working during the time period. A good source of information for anyone interested in the 1950's to the early 1960's.

Arlene Croce wrote a review of "Still/Here", a dance choreographed by Bill T. Jones and published it in the New Yorker. She had not seen the work but wrote the review to protest Jones' use of terminally ill persons in his work, men with AIDS. As might be expected, Croce's article provoked a storm of protest. "The Crisis of Criticism" grew out of the controversy over Croce's article. The book is a collection of essays about criticism itself and addresses the questions of the critic's role in modern culture. Berger reprints Croce's article and a long rebuttal by Joyce Carol Oates. But the best two essays are by Michael Brenson (Resisting the Dangerous Journey: the Crisis of Journalistic Criticsm), and Sarah Rothenberg (Measuring the Immeasurable). The Brenson piece focuses on the critics that most of us read (in The New Yorker, the NY Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal) and castigates them for failing to deal with the major issues of contemporary art. Interestingly, Brenson finds them all deficient in even acknowledging the controversy over the NEA funding which he thinks is "the intersection for almost every major artistic cultural issue..." The essay by Sarah Rothenberg is a wonderful description of the role of the critic and, by extension, the role of "high culture" in civilized society. She rejects the absolute evaluation of artistic creativity by the marketplace, i.e. financial success and fame as the business of artistic promotion and self-promotion, and asks that art "define itself by values of its own." The role of the critic is to be apart from the marketplace: "critical commentary in terms that are idealistic rather than utilitarian". Croce's original article, by reviewing a performance that the critic had not seen, led to a reevaluation of the role of the critic - something she really asked for anyway.

I saw this exhibit at Yale University, and it blew my socks off! The work depicted in the catalogue is well documented, and allows you to see the progression Hesse's work underwent during her short life. This is a book that I have treasured for a long time, and that I am sure I will continue to treasure.