单项选择题

In the last five years prices for western art have soared. Popular artists can’t paint fast enough to keep up with the demand for paintings that regularly sell for $30,000 to $50,000. The boom is all the more striking considering that 20 years ago western art had virtually no market at all. To some extent, its success reflects Americans’ increased interest in their heritage. Certainly there are those who would argue that western art is the truly indigenous American art.
Its roots date back at least as far as the early 19th century, when George Catlin, perhaps the greatest western artist of that period, took his paints and brushes and ventured into the wilderness in the company of William Clark. His close observations of the beautifully savage country molded a new and powerful aesthetic, one that incorporated the sweep of plains and the primitive dynamism of the people who lived there. Catlin’s portraits of Indian chiefs are noble, his paintings of scenes such as "Buffalo Hunt with Bows and Arrows" are full of action and bravery, and for all the smallness of the canvas, they have tremendous scope.
Frederic Remington and Charles Russell continued the tradition of painter as historian into the early 1900s. Their dramatic — some critics say melodramatic narrative art found an overwhelming public sympathy.
Today when people speak of western art they mean realistic art with western subject matter, past and present. In the forefront are those who call themselves cowboy artists, and many of the elite of this group are members of the Cowboy Artists of America, whose first objective is "to perpetuate the memory and culture of the Old West." Not surprisingly, they paint cowboys and, by extension, indians and mountain men, but not landscapes and animal pictures.
Cowboy Artists blend a romantic vision of the Old West with a historically accurate depiction of that way of life; every saddle girth is tied correctly; every feather in an Indian’s war bonnet is in place and of the proper species. In Howard Terpning’s "The Victors", for instance, an anthropologist could tell by the warriors’ clothing which tribe they belonged to.
Many critics today refuse to recognize western art as art. In a real sense, it is, as in the days of Remington and Russell, a popular movement-a middle- class phenomenon. And why not Cowboy art is unequivocally stating middle- class values. In the west, "middle class" isn’t a derogatory term. It’s almost synonymous with America. Just as these people are unabashedly patriotic, they want their art to reflect their values of striving and prospering, of optimism and individualism.
The boom of western paintings suggests in a way that