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      In any artistic production, what does one have as an audience? People. Not, heaven forbid, critics. But people. Not experts in that line of art. But people.

      That old Chinese poet who, after he wrote a poem, went down out of his traditional garret and read it to the flower-selling old lady on the corner had the right idea. If she understood it and thought it was great, he published. If she didn't he put it in the bamboo trash can. Not remarkably, his poems have come down the centuries awesomely praised.

      Well, one could answer this now by just saying that art should communicate to people high and low. But that really doesn't get the sweating professional anywhere as a guide in actually putting together a piece of work and it doesn't give him a yardstick whereby he can say "That is that!" "I've done it." And go out with confidence that he has.

      What is technique? What is its value? Where does it fit? What is perfectionism? Where does one stop scraping off the paint and erasing notes and say "That is that"?

      For there is a point. Some artists don't ever find it. The Impressionists practically spun in as a group trying to develop a new way of viewing and communicating it. They made it--or some of them did like Monet. But many of them never knew where to stop and they didn't make it. They couldn't answer the question "How good does a piece of artwork have to be to be good?"

      In this time of century, there are many communication lines for works of art. Because a few works of art can be shown so easily to so many there may even be fewer artists. The competition is very keen and even dagger sharp. To be good one has to be very good. But in what way and how?

      Well, when I used to buy breakfasts for Greenwich Village artists (which they ate hungrily, only stopping between bites to deplore my commercialism and bastardizing my talents for the gold that bought their breakfasts) I used to ask this question and needless to say I received an appalling variety of responses. They avalanched me with technique or lack of it, they vaguely dwelt on inherent talent, they rushed me around to galleries to show me Picasso or to a board fence covered with abstracts. But none of them told me how good a song had to be to be a song.




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