Still, my judgments will be a good deal less wholesale than those of critics who find nothing but solace or menace in science, bureaucracy, or religion in the lump. For even though art today is a public institution, it is an institution without a theory. No coherent thought exists as to its aim or raison d'etre. The artists, the critics, the consumers, the middlemen are content to defend themselves, each in his sector, as a party or as a person. Looked at in the mass, their attitudes, perforn1ances, and verbalizing are unpredictable and miscellaneous. Some of their acts and feelings come from recognizable traditions, conscious or unconscious; others from a tradition turned upside down -usually conscious. Still other positions derive from catchwords borrowed from the past for a passing need in the present. Thus a contemporary painter will echo Daumier's slogan that" one must be of one's own time.