Read Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) for Free Online

table or a bowl of oranges, or a sun or a moon—or a glass of wine.
    “And could any moralist have called for a more appropriate reaction by painters to World War II, to the death camps and Hiroshima and all the rest of it, than pictures without persons or artifacts, without even allusions to the blessings of Nature? A full moon, after all, had come to be known as a ‘bomber’s moon.’ Even an orange could suggest a diseased planet, a disgraced humanity, if someone remembered, as many did, that the Commandant of Auschwitz and his wife and children, under the greasy smoke from the ovens, had had good food every day.
    “Most art movements during this fashion-crazy century have lasted as long as June bugs. A few have had life spans equivalent to those of horses or dogs. Now, more than a quarter of a century after the death of Jackson Pollock, there are more enthusiastic Abstract Expressionists than ever before, and good ones. And let it be known far and wide, and especially among the Philistines, that all this experimentation has proved that only one sort of person can produce an impressive painting by using a canvas for a Ouija board: a marvelously gifted person, as technically skilled and respectful of art history as was the now legendary 4-F from Cody.
    “Willem de Kooning, a greater painter, possibly, and a European by birth besides, said this of Pollock: ‘Jackson broke the ice.’ “
    The end. Hokay?
    I sounded more enthusiastic about Pollock’s dribble paintings than I really was. (Dishonest!) And I am a person who has spent a lot of his life in commercial galleries and art museums. I have done what my Abstract Expressionist pal Syd Solomon said we had to do if we wanted to tell a good painting from a bad one, which was this: “look at a million paintings first.” After doing that, he said, we could never be mistaken.
    My main reason for not liking the dribbles much, except possibly as textile designs, is primitive: They show me no horizon. I can easily do without information in a painting except for one fact, which my nervous system, and maybe the nervous system of all earthbound animals, insists on knowing: where the horizon is. I think of newborn deer, who have to struggle to their feet and maybe start running for their lives almost immediately. The first piece of important information their eyes transmit to their brains, surely, is the location of the horizon. So it is, too, with human beings awakening from sleep or a coma: the first thing they have to know before reasoning is where the horizon is.
    As responsible shippers say on packages containing objects which are easily distressed, like the human nervous system:

THIS SIDE UP
     
    The Franklin Library asked me to provide a special preface to its expensive edition of
Bluebeard
(illustrated by my daughter Edith Squibb). So I blathered on some more about painting, which my father and I both did badly:
    “To all my friends and relatives in Alcoholics Anonymous,” I began, “I say that they were right to become intoxicated. Life without moments of intoxication is not worth ‘a pitcher of spit,’ as the felicitous saying goes. They simply chose what was for them a deadly poison on which to get drunk.
    “Good examples of harmless toots are some of the things children do. They get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything, the Universe, such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks (throwing little ones, looking under big ones), or echoes or funny sounds from the voicebox or banging on a drum and so on. Only two people are involved: the child and the Universe. The child does a little something to the Universe, and the Great Big Everything does something funny or beautiful or sometimes disappointing or scary or even painful in return. The child teaches the Universe how to be a good playmate, to be nice instead of mean.
    “And professional picture painters, who are what a lot of this made-up story is about, are people