Behind what is written about painting there is always, of course, the immense amount of drivel that is talked about it. No other art is so copiously discussed by its practitioners, or encrusted with so much hollow theorizing. The reason therefor--the second of the two I mentioned above--lies in the obvious fact that painters can talk while they work, and are debarred from working at least half of their waking hours. A poet, when his hormones begin to ferment, not infrequently labors all night; when there is a fog, a thunder-storm or a torch-light parade he is specially inspired. So with a musical composer. But a painter can work only while the light is good, and in the north temperate zone that is not often. So he has much time on his hands, and inasmuch as he seldom has money enough to venture into general society and is usually too ignorant to enjoy reading, he puts in that time talking. Nowhere else on this earth is there so much gabbling as you will find in painters’ studios, save it be in the pubs and more or less public bed-rooms that they frequent. It begins as soon as the sun goes down, and it keeps on all night. And it is always about painting, painting, painting. No other class of artists is so self-centered. Once a youth gets a brush into his hand and turpentine in his hair, he appears to join a race apart, and is interested no longer in the general concerns of the world. Even the other arts do not commonly engage any of his attention. If he ventures into music, it is into the banal music of college boys and colored stevedores. If he reads it is only the colicky nonsense that I have been describing. Even his amours are but incidents of his trade. Now put this immense leisure and this great professional keenness against the plain fact that the problems of painting, in the main, are very simple--that very little that is new is to be said about any of them. The result is a vast dilution of ideas, a stormy battle of mere words, an infinite logomachy. And on its higher levels, embellished with all the arts of the auctioneer, it is art criticism. 8 _Greenwich Village_ The whole saga of Greenwich Village is in Alfred Kreymborg’s autobiography, which he calls, very appropriately, “Troubadour.” The story begins with an earnest and insolvent young man in a garret, fighting cockroaches and writing free verse. It ends with a respectable gentleman of passing forty, legally married to one very charming wife, and in receipt of a comfortable income in royalties from the 6000 Little Theatres which now freckle and adorn our eminent Republic, distracting the males of the Younger Married Set from the Red Peril and Service, and their wives from millinery and birth control.