Art and Community, Unchanged
Introduction: André Martinez-Reed
I write this as a practicing artist, not a historian, critic, or cultural manager. I write from the position of someone who has lived inside the contradictions Mark Tobey described so clearly decades ago—and which remain, almost untouched, today.
I have long admired Tobey not only for his work, but for the clarity of his thinking and the courage of his independence. He understood, earlier than most, that American culture was in danger of confusing activity with vitality, information with insight, and education with initiation. He also understood the personal cost of refusing to conform to those confusions.
That Tobey found his deepest recognition outside his own country is not incidental. It is emblematic. Like many American artists of genuine inward commitment, he had to step beyond national expectations to be seen clearly. His international recognition—particularly in Europe—stood in quiet contrast to the hesitations and misunderstandings he faced at home. This was not because his work was obscure, but because it resisted easy explanation.
I offer the following essay in the spirit of Mark Tobey’s Art and Community, not as an update or correction, but as a confirmation. Nothing essential has changed. The same forces remain in place, and the same losses continue to occur—often unnoticed, sometimes even celebrated.
Art and Community, Unchanged
When Mark Tobey wrote Art and Community, he described a condition that still defines much of contemporary cultural life: great activity surrounding art, paired with a startling scarcity of artists. In countries like America, where paths to culture are consciously organized through lectures, readings, panels, institutions, and credentials, there is endless discussion of art and remarkably little space for its actual emergence.
Culture is pursued the way one acquires a commodity. People rush to obtain it—quickly, efficiently, visibly—in much the same way they buy a coat. In this rush, the artist is often startled, even frightened, driven metaphorically into the woods. Not by hostility, but by an overwhelming emphasis on the mental side of things: explanations, classifications, relevance, theory. Art is asked to justify itself before it is allowed to exist.
This condition has intensified rather than diminished. Today the artist is expected to speak fluently about their work, situate it within approved frameworks, and demonstrate awareness of prevailing discourse. Intuition is tolerated only after it has been translated into acceptable language. Silence is suspect. The inward life—the true source of art—is treated as insufficient unless externally validated.
At the same time, a great many people remain uninitiated. This is not due to a lack of desire. On the contrary, there is a widespread longing to encounter art directly, firsthand. But existing educational methods too often check this impulse rather than liberate it. People are guided away from their own perceptions and toward secondhand understanding. They are taught what to think before they are taught how to see.
Art clubs, societies, and schools frequently form barriers to native contact. They promise access, but deliver mediation. An extensive course in art history may provide a magnificent scholastic approach, yet it often leaves the eyes unopened while the mouth parrots names, dates, movements, and the opinions of critics and authorities. Composition, color, form—these are discussed endlessly, while the living experience of painting remains distant and abstract.
This is not a failure of intelligence, but a failure of trust. Tobey understood that art is not entered through accumulation of knowledge, but through direct exposure—through risk, vulnerability, and sustained attention. When education substitutes explanation for encounter, it produces fluency without perception. People learn to speak about art while remaining fundamentally untouched by it.
Community, under these conditions, becomes artificial. It gathers around discourse rather than experience, around agreement rather than attention. The artist, sensing this, retreats—not out of contempt, but out of necessity. The solitude Tobey described was not an escape from responsibility, but the only remaining space where inward work could survive.
Nothing has changed because the same misunderstanding persists: that culture can be transmitted primarily through the intellect. Tobey argued instead for a culture rooted in perception, where art serves as a shared field of awareness rather than an object of analysis. Such a community cannot be efficiently organized. It emerges slowly, when people are allowed to meet art before it is explained to them.
That Tobey himself had to leave America to be fully recognized is a telling fact. His work, deeply spiritual yet rigorously disciplined, did not align comfortably with American expectations of visibility, productivity, or clarity. Abroad, particularly in Europe, his commitment to inner necessity was more readily understood as strength rather than evasiveness. This was not a rejection of America, but a quiet indictment of its cultural impatience.
The persistence of Tobey’s relevance is not nostalgic. It is diagnostic. We still privilege explanation over presence, structure over sensitivity, authority over experience. We still create institutions that manage art rather than protect its conditions. And we still risk losing artists—not because they disappear, but because they are never allowed to fully form.
The task Tobey identified remains unfinished. Art continues to ask for courage: the courage to trust perception, to allow silence, and to let community arise from shared attention rather than shared language. Until that courage is widely practiced, art will remain surrounded by activity, and starved of life.
