tional, social, or ethnic "advantage" is a naive delusion. The
only attitude that can be maintained as consistent with the
principles of a democratic society is that which enables each
one to find "his own proper diet."

Barzun's position might be misunderstood to make criticism
impossible. But, the only significant art criticism, he would
propose, is the help that a critic offers to enable one to find
his own diet. This is the pragmatic usefulness of criticism;
anything else is dogmatic, in a realm of experience where no
"ultimate authority" matters (except for the purposes of snob-
bism). This is not to say that there are no standards; there will
always be the distinction between popular art and art for the
connoisseur. But Barzun underlines the historical fact that
such standards as make criticism useful are in no sense abso-
lute, eternal, or universal. Barzun's position is a clear-cut
attack on the essentially antidemocratic cant that passes for
the "aesthetes" love of art in their social struggle against the
Philistines. It should not be forgotten that this selection is
taken from Barzun's book on human freedom.

The essay by Nikolai Shamota, "On Tastes in Art," appeared
in Soviet Literature. Published by the Union of Soviet Writers,
the magazine is translated into English, French, German,
Polish, and Spanish for the widest possible distribution out-
side of the U.S.S.R. In direct contrast to Barzun''s pragmatism,
Shamota presents a theory of art that assumes all three of the
"absolutes" Barzun considers fallacious. Essential to his posi-
tion is the idea that differences of taste are reducible to
particular social causes. While in the West it appears that
the most current causally-reductive hypotheses for explaining
differences of taste are psychoanalytic, in the Soviet Union
such differences are interpreted simply as functions of socio-
economic differences. This assumes a psychology of condi-
tioned reflexes in which the most important elements are social
class distinctions. Moreover, art, like every other human activ-
ity, is taken to be a tool in the political "war" for social better-
ment. It has its function to perform in the ideological struggle.
In other words, all art is only propaganda. The result is the
dogmatism of the only officially acceptable kind of art-social-
ist realism, ^* which offers a political standard for all of the
arts. Shamota''s article states the tenets of this position suc-
cinctly. This communist aesthetics, however, is not to be mis-
taken for an exact standard of criticism; Shamota grants that
different artists have "different ways of passing an artistic
'judgment,'" although he does not go on to elaborate such,

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