This came out of me after reading Mr. Puteklis’ letter in the January _Little Review_. I notice that all my socialist and anarchist friends hold a similar view, one going so far as to declare in the course of an argument on art with a well-known etcher that his etchings could not live because they did not portray the struggles of the masses. Being in principle an anarchist myself, and sympathetic towards much of socialism, I cannot speak as an antagonist to these people but as one of their number who sees that on this point of art’s purpose they are mistaken. Mr. Puteklis’s communication reminded me again of the misconception of art’s essence noticeable among various classes of those today who possess what they term “social consciousness”. For though it is true that the strongest names in contemporary literature, painting, sculpture are those of men and women who in some extreme way are opposed to the existent social order, and the only being capable of producing profound and significant art is of revolutionary mind, essentially; nevertheless, we find in the socialistic university professor (as when Dr. Cox of the University of Washington writes in _The South Atlantic Quarterly_ of “The Distemper of Modern Art and its Remedy”), in the intelligent working-man and the revolutionary worker, the same misunderstanding of art that we suffer from in the well-to-do bourgeois and in the church and other capitalistic institutions, with the same determination to degrade art to some form of direct utility. The communal art of the past necessarily served the emotional life of the community. It was the “handmaiden”, as Mr. Puteklis puts it, “of oppression and superstition”. Much of pre-modern painting and sculpture, as we all so well know, was not painting and sculpture _per se_. It was merely symbols used like language for information on extrinsic topics by means of illustration.