Being Critical Of Art Is A Way

Every Movement That Slays Its Gods Creates New Ones, Of Course. I Loathe Talk Of The Sixties And Seventies Being A 'greatest Generation' Of Artists, But If We're Going To Use Such Idiotic Appellations, Let This One Also Be Applied To The Artists, Curators, And Gallerists Who Emerged In The First Half Of The Nineties.

While It May Be A Really Trying, Weird Time For The Art World, I See Good Work All The Time. If You Just Go Around To That Many Galleries, And If You Stay Open, You're Going To See Work With Enough Energy And Surprise. I Don't Think I've Ever Gone To The Galleries Without Coming Home Thinking, Gee, I Now Know Something I Didn't Know This Morning.

Art Is Good, Bad, Boring, Ugly, Useful To Us Or Not. It Does Or Doesn't Disturb Optical Monotony, And Succeeds Or Fails In Surmounting Sterility Of Style Or Visual Stereotype; It Creates New Beauty Or It Doesn't.

Art Schools Are Partly The Villain Here. (never Mind That I Teach In Them.) This Generation Of Artists Is The First To Have Been So Widely Credentialed, And Its Young Members So Fetishize The Work Beloved By Their Teachers That Their Work Ceases To Talk About Anything Else. Instead Of Enlarging Our View Of Being Human, It Contains Safe Rehashing Of Received Ideas About Received Ideas. This Is A Melancholy Romance With Artistic Ruins, Homesickness For A Bygone Era. This Yearning May Be Earnest, But It Stunts Their Work, And By Turn The Broader Culture.

After 1909, Monet Drastically Enlarged His Brushstrokes, Disintegrated His Images, And Broke Through The Taming Constraints And Delicacy Of Impressionism For Good. Nineteen Gnarly Paintings, Starting In 1909 And Carrying Through His Final Seventeen Years, Finish Off The Notion That Monet Went Happily Ever After Into Lily-land.