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ESTHETIC ACTIVITIES IN AMERICA: AN AN- 
SWER TO HIS CRITICS: BY GUTZON BORGLUM 
teapot tempest created by my article on the'Wlack 
sincerity and reverence in our aesthetic activities- 
blished in THE CRAFTsMAN for October,-cannot 
gratifying or encouraging to anyone but a sen- 
ionalist. That earnestness, or appeal to earnest- 
;s, appeal for pause, for leisure to reflect on the 
rashness of the hour that is turning the pale, hesitating 
sprouts in our aesthetic life into junk-mongers who forget the fine 
sensitiveness that was once in their own hearts, should do other than 
-at least in our private conscience-draw us nearer together, is sad 
and disheartening. 
I am an optimist through and through. I have more faith in the 
final outcome than ninety-nine men in every hundred I meet. I 
can draw a longer list of rare, sincere, or gifted men in American fine 
arts than anyone of my critics has attempted. But that is not the 
question. We are not talking of the isolated but of the common 
spirit, the lack of sincerity that builds for one common result. 
Some of my critics are amazed that I could think such things as 
my article contained; more amazed that I could write or would write 
them if I did think them. Does not this very attitude betray in- 
sincerity? Any man who will carry his head erect for a day in 
New York, knows that I have only pointed at the truth, that a con- 
dition of rottenness exists here in nearly all matters of aesthetic activity
which will not bear ventilating. Perhaps that is what they fear. The 
methods that obtain for the furthering and building of our memorials 
in this country are an open scandal. The importation, sale, and 
general business of supplying pseudo-European junk to meet our 
parvenu "taste" is a page of our life that will not bear reading.
And dear critics, I have not the slightest wish to kick over any of 
these apple-carts, but I do think it is time to call a halt. I think it 
is time that our architects realized that every building is a temple of 
some kind and holds in the motive for its creation the key to its 
structure, and that they can arrive at nothing but confusion as long 
as they rely upon their memory, their library. 
Our conditions are our own, and if our art is to be, it is time we 
took a step forward without the rotting crutch of antiquity. Every 
idea, every support to carry us on our way must come from the 
solitary labor of each single artist, from the "sweat and smart"
of 
his own relation to the subject in hand. The beauty, the charm of 
our surroundings can no longer be considered as a semi-transcendental 
vagary. If there shall be any loveliness in our surroundings it must