Time Magazine:
(July 1994)

Fated to be before my time always, I find that my missive of a week ago was a week premature [one week after the previous letter, Hughes published a review of the Whistler exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.]. One would think the dead, especially when they are as charming as I, might be left to enjoy a few hours of deserved admiration without having to answer to the self-appointed purveyors of taste, but apparently Mr. Hughes (who is beginnning to remind me of my own dear 'Arry, God rest his soul) thinks otherwise. I suppose I should be thankful I wasn't excoriated like Poor Julian or quartered like Fetching Miss Finley, but being classified "a good, but not a great painter" by a non-painter raises the specter of presumption, at least from where I am writing. I find I am just below Messieurs Degas and Manet, whose claims to greatness will be honored but not their artistic opinions. What matters that I am respected by fellow artists? The critics will sort all that out later.

How does Whistler "look from here," he asks? Where is here? I answer. The burnt-out end of the century of the anti-artist, of the artist as sick man, of "the artist as nuisance." The "self-invented" artist gives way to the Greenberg-invented artist and the Boone-invented artist and the MOMA-invented artist. The well-read Australian with a limpid pen climbs into the pantheon of immortals with Ruskin, Bell, Fry, and Rosenberg. And let us not forget 'Arry.

Signed
J.A.M. Whistler [with butterfly]

The Nation:
(March 1999)

Re: "Degas in Vegas." I suppose I should ask first is Mr. Danto ill? Recent accident? Are we indulging him for some reason? Allowing him to E-mail his first draft and be printed without an edit? "Let's give him the cover, without any other banners, and 2500 words to babble about nothing. It's the least we can do for a dying man." If so, the readers should be informed, so we can share in the compassion.

What is this article about? Is it an opinion piece? The only theme that runs through the whole article is the question of authenticity. After a full page of uninspiring and uninspired description, and loose analogies peppered with un-poignant satire, Danto finally asks it. But he never answers it except with the bald assertion, another 1000 words later, that they are "deeply authenticated." Deeply? Nice word choice. There is no substantiation, no list of sources, no attempt to share his verification process with us, assuming he had one. Who said they were authentic? Why should we believe them? If that is what this article is about, then let's have some proof. It would still be a boring article, but at least it would have a point.

In paragraph six, Danto devotes a sentence to the "legendary" art critic Dave Hickey. Who? Danto does not tell us. He gives us exactly one more sentence on Hickey after that, and it is unclear why Hickey is mentioned in either spot. Hickey teaches at UNLV. So there are other "artistic" interests in the city. What does this have to do with Bellagio? No one knows. Does Hickey teach criticism or art? If he teaches art, as is implied here, what are his credentials? This might have been an interesting subplot. But Danto does not go there, because Hickey was only mentioned to be mentioned. He is now legendary for his appearances in The Nation.

Also in paragraph six, Danto offers us, apropos of nothing, two parenthetical sentences, of 75 words, that make no sense at all. The differentiation of "Museum of Museums paintings" and "Museum of Museums painters" is convoluted, wordy, and gratuitous. I defy anyone to tell me what the analogy to Madame Tussaud's is about.

All this so that we can be told in the last paragraph, and apparently without irony, the "moral legend" (word choice) of the "triste truth" (word choice, by god) of Van Gogh's life: a fake painting by Vincent in Las Vegas would not be redemption for him, but a real painting is.


The New York Times Book Review, 2001

Paul Mattick, in his review of Jed Perl's new book Eyewitness, unwittingly confirms Perl's contention that critics are a large part of the problem of modern art. Perl also confirms this in his book, in ways he didn't intend. Both men are self-proclaimed experts in a field in which all their knowledge is abstract. Unless they are great artists, I can't imagine why anyone is interested in their opinions on art. I suppose someone must be published in this field that somehow remains provocative, despite the complete dearth of great artists, and these are the lucky ones.

The only points I could glean from Mattick's review are that he disagrees with Perl about Warhol and that he disdains Perl's claims to transcendence~since Perl has been a successsful critic for years. Mattick seems to imply that anyone who is allowed into print by anyone is an insider. I realize that Mattick only had two columns to work with here, but he might have chosen a central thesis that did not look, at short notice, so much like envy.

Mattick accuses Perl of a "tin ear" that becomes a "tin eye," leading us to suppose that Mattick thinks he is the better writer, and therefore the better art viewer. And yet in his second paragraph he gives us the charming oxymoron, a "standard trope," which to my ear is so much braying. It reminds one of the verbal melodies of Arthur Danto. In his rush to use this lovely word, made somewhat less lovely by Harold Bloom's overuse of it (but, of course, this is why it is so popular), Mattick has forgotten to look it up. And then one must consider his forced analogy of Perl with Orrin Hatch near the end of the article: an analogy so tenuous and transparently political it must be considered ad hominem.

In the final analysis, the argument of art should not be about who is the best writer or the best viewer of art. Nor is art about who is the best self-promoter, the best purveyor of cool, or the best oiler of Boone or Saatchi or Gagosian. The question of art is who is the best creator. Mattick claims an understanding of the "art system" and its laws, an understanding that allows him to see why Perl has been left out of its upper echelons. But he apparently misses the even higher ground, from which I can see that a few years hence this whole art system will be a metaphysical relic, like to Reformation disquisitions on consubstantiation or the exact age of the earth. Whether you are the one who calculated that creation happened on 4004BC, or the one who spent years disproving it, you now appear more than a bit ridiculous. Likewise, anyone who misunderstands art to the extent of taking Duchamp or Warhol or Twombly seriously, either pro or con, is soon to be dismissed as an errant fool, no matter how wordy or learned.

The reason some writers and artists become famous now rather than others is not difficult to fathom. Mattick implies that they may deserve to be so. This sort of reasoning is on the level of those who claim that modern art is popular because the new Tate Modern in London is drawing a thousand people an hour. But as far as free entertainment goes, a dead circus elephant drew larger crowds a few years back, and public hangings once beat them all. And yet no one (but a modern critic) would call such things art.



Austin American-Statesman, 1998

Christopher Schade opens his review of Re-Aligning Visions, the current exhibition at the Huntington, by proclaiming it "the most compelling... since the Vogel collection... a month ago." Wow, Chris. Really, has it been that long? And how did we get through the inspirational void of those three off-weeks?

Once again, though, I must demur. The comparison to the Vogel exhibit is apt, but not for its ambition or afflatus. Possibly the only way the Vogel exhibit's nullity could be out-nulled is by the cryospheric depths of the supercooled Visions. A "drawing" in thumbtacks; the word Rodin rubberstamped on a fluff of cotton in a box; and everywhere, gratuitously framed squiggles. All in all, a criminal waste of art supplies and an insult to treehood. I suppose I could have read the blurbs to see what all of this was meant to mean, but there is nothing in the realm of possibilities that could make a rubberstamped fluff of cotton interesting to me. I have seen enough of these mini-apologies to write them myself, anyway. The cotton symbolizes evanescence; the box, closure; the artist's name, the fleeting importance of the cult of the person or whatnot.... Fine. But give me the fleeting importance of a real creator like Rodin: you can have the sour grapes of these homunculi and homunculae if that's what appeals to you. In their quests for artistic freedom and creative alternatives, these artists have discovered only their own tininess.

Only one drawing in Visions deserved the name: Luis Caballero's six-foot charcoal drawing on the second floor. This masterpiece from the permanent collection of the HRC is one of the University's few works of art. Its presence in Visions is a mystery, though. There is nothing alternative about it, unless there is something inherently alternative in being from Bogata. Caballero's line is powerfully expressive, with the curve and dent of greatness of a Rubens and the pathos of a Kathe Kollwitz. But the virtuosity and emotion of this work have nothing to do with the wink and the sneer, the slip and slur of the rest of the show. As an example, this drawing hangs directly across from a gigantic triptych, by who cares who, "quoting" (read "blaspheming") half a dozen greater artists, including Ingres, Goya, and Picasso. With sub-collegiate draughtsmanship and many cubic feet of effort, this artist mocks a tradition he apparently has no ability to transcend. Why do we care? Or, I should say, why does the cadre of curators and other academics who organized this show care? Why do we continue to be confronted with 200-page catalogs, weeks of lectures and other backslapping, and asinine corporate sponsorship, all in support of a show of trifling exiguity?

I have a message for all of you from the Muse, and it is this: Art needs no curation, analysis, critique, or corporate sponsorship. It suffers of your goodwill.



Platform[The journal of the school of architecture, University of Texas], 1998

I just read the article on the Blanton [Museum] controversy in the most recent issue, and I was not surprised to find a one-sided argument. I suppose it is not up to you to supply your own refutation, but you might have given your readers a bit more insight into this disagreement. Page after page of describing your own heroics and the Regents' idiocy does little to establish your credibility to the outside world. But, I remind myself, for those in PoMo there is no outside world.

Just because those who disagree with you do not staple together signs and shout childish names at the news cameras does not mean that you go unopposed. I have always held the Regents in disdain, so do not think I am supporting their positions in criticizing yours. But it has always been unclear to me why the schools of architecture and art history felt this museum was theirs. From the very beginning they have simply assumed that the museum design would be avant garde, the more the better. The regents have not acted in a democratic manner, as you have said again and again. But have you? I don't remember any referendum or vote on this. Tony Sanchez' tastes have (rightly) been called into question. But why exactly should we discount his, but accept yours? I don't understand how his opinions are a matter of taste, but your opinions are not. I recommend that you don't bring "democracy" into it at all, if you want to win in the end. The Regents have an extreme concentration of power, it is true. But PoMo is only a tiny minority of self-interested folks as well, as this whole fiasco has shown. I do not believe that either Larry Speck or Jessie Otto Hite is representative of any majority in this city.

The truth is that Ms. Hite has put together a series of shows that no one, except a few academic insiders and aspiring art critics, wants to look at. The new Suida Manning collection brought a few folks to campus, but even that has been oversold. Most of the work is fourth-rate leftovers that the real museums didn't want, or were too savvy to bid for way back when. And Jonathan Bober is probably the biggest phony west of the Mississippi. I personally will never return to the Blanton if only for fear of having to again listen to him talk about himself in stentorian tones. As for the contemporary art exhibitions: any audience participation is strictly charity work. All the museums in Austin have been force-feeding the public PoMo agitprop for twenty years. The "masses" are chided for being apathetic about art. But it is not that they are uninterested in art: they are uninterested in the empty conceptualizations that pass for art. How long can the academics continue to dismiss widespread disenchantment with PoMo as bourgeois narrowness or political recidivism? How long will they continue to preach "pluralism" and "inclusion" while appealing to no one but art theorists and the frontline of PC nebbishes?

The saddest thing in all this is that once again art is left out of the equation. You would think that art would be the primary concern with a museum. But when all this squabbling is over and the Blanton stands hugely and expensively on whatever site is chosen, it will stand largely empty of art. And it will stand completely empty of great contemporary art. Why? Because there is no great contemporary art. PoMo has killed it. The term "great," like the term "talent" or the term "beauty," is outdated. It is disallowed. It is hierarchic, and we want no more hierarchies, thank you. Theory itself has made "great art" an oxymoron. So Austin will have another building, probably no better and hopefully no worse than the Convention Center or the airport. It will have curators and directors and wealthy benefactors and corporate underwriters and art critics and architecture mavens, all congratulating eachother for the good they have done art. Our custodians of art. But we will still not have any art.


To the judges of the National Sculpture Competition, 2000 (including Bruno Lucchesi)
Art Students League, New York:

I was in NYC for the contest. I saw the works in progress, I saw the finished works, I saw the model. I wish I could say I have never seen such a complete catastrophe in judging. But, unfortunately, I have. I have seen it over and over, in every contest my students or I have entered. Whether it is the OPA, the PSA, the NSS, NAWA, the ASOPA, Allied Artists, AAPL, the NWS, it doesn't matter. In each and every exhibition or competition, there are mediocre judges picking mediocre works that look like theirs for all the prizes. In many of them, the judges pick friends or students for prizes, and no one apparently finds this strange. This was perhaps as clear-cut an example of blindness and/or fraud, though, as I have seen.

I have to ask, why? I have it narrowed down to two possible reasons; but which it is, I really can't say. Is it that you honestly can't tell good work from bad? Have you become so insular, so blinded by your own narrow techniques and teaching methods, that you can't see anything that doesn't look like your own reflection? Your own work is clearly, and understandably, the limit of what you can do, artistically. Is it also the limit of what you can see? If so, you are not qualified to be a judge. You will never recognize work that is better than your own, and so you will never be able to encourage real talent. You will only continue to stroke your own ego by turning out inferior clones of yourselves.

Or is it something more? Is it that you can see it, but don't want to? You can't encourage work better than your own, because that would be cutting your own throat. Your position is too fragile to deal honestly with the work of others.

Or maybe (it finally dawns on me) you refuse to see it, because the outcome was predetermined from the beginning: it was your contest and the prize was meant for one of your own. Not for the best student, but for the best student from the organizers' schools. Got to keep that money in the family. If so, why not just say so next year? Why let in the guy from Texas? He hasn't got a chance anyway, and if he comes in and blows you all away, it just makes you feel bad. Twice. Once, because you realize your schools aren't worth a damn. Twice, because you have to cheat him to keep him from taking your money.

You think you can do whatever you want, but be assured that history will know. Like the Academicians who kept Whistler out of the Royal Academy or Rodin out of the Ecole, you will be remembered among the small and narrow. Your long-term reputations are effected by everything you do. Perhaps you think you have no long-term reputations to worry about, and so you can scheme all you want. Undoubtedly you are right.


Monsieur l'Ennemi:
(Jonathan Bober, curator, HRC Barnes Collection, UT)
March 27, 1999

Please disregard my recent invitation [to my show]. You are hereby uninvited. It may be consolation to you to know, however, that you are now the winner of the First Annual Clement Greenberg Memorial Award, given by me to the most self-obsessed pharisee, the whitest sepulcher, in Austin. I am aware that there are many fine specimens back East, and that your chance of reaching real altitude, attaining star status, was low there. Perhaps that is why you chose Austin. Still, even here, the competition was stiff, not so much from quality as from quantity of candidates, especially in the arts. But all your hard work has paid off. Congratulations.

I am sure it is gratifying to all the slobbering dilettantes to know how many calories you eat each day, lest they lie awake at night in fear that you may expire, and with you so much vital information on the arts. How could I hold a brush or a chisel without knowing which painter of 17th century Genoa is now considered by the non-artist to be academic, and which inspired? And what will all those MFA candidates and PhD's in art history do without your words to parrot again and again, since there may be only "a half-dozen in the world" who can chirp so fine?

Eunuch of the Muses! Know Ye that the artist takes in all the necessary information through the eyes, and that the opinions of the crypt-crawlers and other "sages of the universities" is nought but effluent. Whether you have a thousand things to do tomorrow or nothing is of no interest to me, or any future artist. You will never create an interesting artifact. That is the bottom line.

Know Ye also that your existence is a bane to your own field. At a time when art is being sacrificed on the altar of political expedience, and the obsolescence of all the true virtues in painting goes on apace, you draw resources and scholarship to your own dissecting room, to compensate for your own disabilities. It is all too transparent, and too common--feigning an interest in art as the paradigm of careerism. But know that the ghosts of Michelangelo and Van Gogh look upon you, and they do not smile on your learning.

I suppose you are aware of Whistler's The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. This letter will be published in my own book, and history will know your true relationship to art. If you wish to further embarass yourself, reply, and I will publish that, too.


American Society of Portrait Painters, Dec. 2000

I was embarassed to be part of your competition and festival this year, which was little more than a crass, ill-conceived commentary on portraiture and an opportunity for poor judging. I will always remember these low points:
      1) Richard Whitney's absurd comments about Whistler, an artist so far out of his league that any critique would be inappropriate.
      2) John Howard Sanden's pathetic admission of powerlessness in the face of the client. It was all the more sad in that Mr. Sanden seems to be a genuinely modest and likable man (unlike Mr. Whitney). But the message Mr. Sanden sent young artists when he admitted to letting the client (and the portrait agency, no doubt) bully him into bowdlerizing his work was nonetheless a sobering and depressing one. If Mr. Sanden, a painter at the top of his field, cannot resist the pressures of the marketplace, what does that say about the chances of those below him?
      3) Michael del Priore's bumbling attempt at an English accent at the awards dinner, to the astonishment of Richard Ormond. If there were any other well-bred persons there (which I began to doubt), they too must have cringed at such a mixture of fawning joviality and false superiority.
      4) The non-attendance at Richard Schmid's award presentation. Another sign of the falseness of everyone concerned with modern portraiture~professing great admiration for Mr. Schmid, but caring only for their own careers and timetables.
      5) Finalist Martin Hugg telling me (in a conversation I wish I never had) that Michelangelo's David was famous only because it was large. This I now take to be a good example of the level of understanding of art at the festival as a whole.
      6) The choice of award winners. The entire festival was one long paean to Sargent, but when it came time to give the awards, there was no emphasis on brushwork or paint quality or color harmony or compositional ambition. This did not completely surprise me, in that most of the judges pay little attention to such things in their own work. I would like to know how the judges voted individually, so I will know where to place the blame; but their choices as a group were mystifying.
      Yugi Wang was probably the most sinned against. I agree that his background was cluttered, but at least his compositional ambition was large. He had beautiful paint quality, lovely brushwork, incredible face and hands, and his sitter had a strong personality which he captured perfectly. Even though I did not "like" the painting (his choice of sitter and emotion did not appeal to me), it was still hands-down the best painting there. I would have been honored to get second to Mr. Wang this year.
      Stephen Levin got the insider award this year, but I do not understand it. Surely everyone knows it is easier to paint small, and to paint a self-portrait. His paint handling was good, but the piece he entered was facile and narcissistic, not to mention contemptuous of the competition. That the other artists voted for him is only a sign of their bewilderment.
      Zhang Li's portrait was technically solid but emotionally empty, a piece of glittering hackwork.
      Henry Wingate's and Paul Delorenzo's works were smashingly unmemorable, and Jeff Bass' work was photorealism of the worst kind, probably projected and certainly painted with no brushes larger than a 2. The paint looked like it had been scrabbled on with a toothpick. It is a stretch to even call this painting.
      I don't know what message the judges intended to send Mr. Wang and myself, but I imagine that we got it. Obviously, I would not write a letter like this if I ever intended to have anything to do with your organization again. But I don't. I will leave you to your mediocre paintings, bloated egos, and dreams of financial success. If we all live long enough, you will hear of me again, though. Even after your festival, my idealism (and my independence) is intact. And my dreams are a bit more broad than yours.
      Please circulate this letter to all the judges. And forward my request to the proper authority that I would like my painting removed from your website. I would like to burn this "bridge" properly.


Atlantic Monthly, May 18, 2000

Another great cover story [Unabomber/Harvard]. Atlantic Monthly is the last general interest magazine standing. The New Yorker~overrated since the 70's~finally imploded, Lapham is in senescence at Harper's (or he has let Ehrenreich take over, I don't know), but you guys just keep getting better.

I have a couple of comments on Alston Chase's article. I agree that Kaczynski is a mystery that needs to be solved, but Chase's final page of commentary~what one might call his summation~was overly broad, abstract, and finally unconvincing. In the first sentence of this last section he mentions the "corrosive powers of intellect itself." This is a dangerous non-sequitur that should make any intelligent person wince. There may be many lessons to be learned from history, and from a consideration of Kaczynski, but I don't think that is one of them. Chase implies that intellect is necessarily arrogant. But it is not knowledge that is corrosive: it is what we learn, or fail to learn. Our "capacity to conceive theories or philosophies that promote violence," or to conceive any esoteric theories whatever, is not the problem. To conceive is not to believe. People much stupider than Kaczynski choose to believe things that, while less wordy, are just as flawed and just as violent.
      The problem appears to be that Kaczynski, despite having a genius IQ, was still not smart enough to sort through all the inconsistencies and holes of a modern education and the brutalities of an American upbringing. This comes as no surprise, really; but putting it in these terms is surely less alienating (and confusing) than dredging up the "nature of evil" and Stalin and martyrdom and being shocked that dogs backed into a corner do bite.
      For instance, Chase's most telling section is where he touches on the difference between relativism and absolutism. He sees Kaczynski as an absolutist in a relativist society, and he is right. But then he states that Kaczynski "absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-free reasoning...." Here is the internal inconsistency, the worm in the nut. When it comes to "truth," Kaczynski is an absolutist. When it comes to action, or "morality," he is a relativist: "there is no logical justification for morality." But, in that case, Ted, there is no logical justification for immorality. Nor is there any logical justification for "wild nature," or for condemning technology.
      Chase and Kaczynski both start out trying to justify an intellectual stance against relativism, but end up making absolutists look bad~Kaczynski by trying to justify violence with pseudo-philosophy and Chase by getting lost in platitudes and abstractions.
      What begs to be said in this article, and in modern education in general, is that there are two types of "absolutism" that have long been confused. There is the absolutism of the "Deutschland uber alles" sort, which is obviously absurd. And then there is the absolutism that states that for any specific situation, there are better and worse ways of doing things. This sort of absolutism has never been refuted. It is common sense. But even the most intelligent thinkers often get lost in the move from general to specific. Advances in "tolerance" have led to an increased awareness that general statements (especially truth statements) are not as easy to defend as we once thought. Truth is relative to the situation. But this is not to say there is no truth. For any given situation, the facts remain. Truth, in any specific case, is not relative.
      Likewise, the problem with scientists is not that they are corrosively intelligent or that science itself is evil. It is that scientists are very poor philosophers, and very poorly socialized. "Humanism" has not filled the void of a dead religion because humanism is itself a void. The humanities are a dead letter. As a society we expend almost no money, time, or intelligence teaching or considering these most important questions, except in the most fleeting and cursory manner. People take up "self-help" like it is a hobby, a stop-gap, or a drug. Our psychology departments are booming, but that is no cause for celebration. Modern psychology is a shallow substitute for classical philosophy. Positivism, behaviorism, and various other narrow filters have been put on a natural curiosity, and even our reading lists have become dessicated.
      There are apparently no longer any living sources of widom, or none that are paid to lecture at Harvard or Berkeley. We spend unbelievable amounts of money recruiting and educating scientists and businesspeople, endowing chairs and underwriting research. We spend no money or time producing people who know how to live. Kaczynski and Chase fled to Montana to to buy themselves peace: they just read the wrong books, or read them in poor light. Those less intelligent, also lacking teachers worthy of respect, read even worse books~L. Ron Hubbard or Kahlil Gibran or B.F. Skinner.
      Nothing will change until we begin teaching people how to live again. Not as dogma or indoctrination (which we are so scared of we literally can't see straight). But as examples of successful lives lived by real people, whether it is Jesus or the Buddha, or George Washington or Winston Churchill, or Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, or Betty Friedan or Faye Wattleton, or Noam Chomsky or Wendell Berry, or Lewis Thomas or Aldo Leopold. Why we don't have Chomsky lecturing on general topics, instead of just linguistics or foreign policy, is a mystery to me. Ralph Nader should be paid exorbitant amounts by Stanford or Yale to pass on everything he knows, not just his opinions about consumer issues. This country could use thousands of young people cut from his mold. Ditto for Wendell Berry. And Faye Wattleton. And many others.
      Why don't we? Two reasons. First, because it would be bad for business. One Nader and one Chomsky is bad enough. Let those (truly) intellectual genes start to multiply, and some people are going to lose a lot of money. And this is where Kaczynski is right. Where he is justified (whether logically or morally is a question of semantics). Corporate control of government and education is a bad idea. Not because I say it is, or because I want it to be, but because it can be demonstated to be to the satisfaction of any sane person.
      And two, because we have mis-defined democracy. What we wanted was equal opportunity, fairness, and a maximum of self-governance. But in dismantling false hierarchies, we have dismantled the real ones, too. The hierarchies that allow for teachers and mentors, for the passing on of knowledge. Teenagers now think they have hit the apex of wisdom at sixteen (or, a bestseller tells us we peaked at five). If we are all equal and truth is relative, what is there to learn anyway? Elders who would teach them this are not worthy of respect, and young people know it: and so the circle has become vicious.
      There is a reason Chase's "educated elite" are uneasy. They are invested in a system they know to be wrong, and they don't have the courage to divest. They do nothing but read and write books (books that no one under thirty reads). But if violence is wrong, then the alternative is non-violent action. The alternative is to live your life differently. Don't work for the big company. Don't buy all the stuff. Don't vote for the jerks. Don't spend more time "making a living" than teaching yourself and your kids how to live. And talk to your neighbors: together you may find the courage to resist. The bottom line is, whatever needs to be done, do it yourself, as far as you can.
      And one last thing. A writing style is a sign of the times. An argument, like Chase's, that moves from the specific to the abstract is both a mirror of helplessness and a cause of it. The universities and magazines need thinkers who can, with eloquence and erudition, move from the general to the specific, giving the student or reader an idea that something can be done.


Austin American-Statesman, Jan. 1999

Re: Dealer to the Dellionaires [i.e. people made wealthy via the Dell corporation]. I have worked with George Attal on and off for fifteen years, as one of his "promising" artists. I have nothing against George: he sold a number of my paintings, did a show for me, and treated me about as well as my other galleries. But the effusive tone of this article rang false to me, not so much for making George out to be an artworld saint, as for flattering his clients into thinking they have any taste or education in art, or desire to have it. It is not George's job to educate the world about art. It is his job to sell art, and he is very good at it. He gives his clients what they want. What they want, unfortunately, has very little to do with art. Sometimes it has to do with decoration, sometimes with a big name, sometimes with a big price. Rarely does it concern beauty, subtlety, elevation, or emotion. I am not slamming "kitsch" in favor of Modernism. I am attacking the whole market for art, antique to avant garde, which is driven by money. Evermore unrefined money.
      I found the quoted dialogue especially grating. "See the line, how it rises gracefully..." "Oh, no, not thin naked ladies, not in my husband's office." Hah, Hah, Blah. Not everyone who claims to love art really does. We have always known this. But writing articles about "Dellionaires," making them appear interesting, is only pandering to their fenced-in vacuity, and exacerbating an already chronic problem in art.


New York Times:
(November 21, 2003)

Michael Kimmelman drops many names in his article (11/21/03) on John Currin: Holbein, Durer, Houdon, Goya, Pontormo, Mantegna, Carracci, and Van Eyck, among others. And while it is true that Currin has stolen his compositions and poses from almost everyone (which used to be called lack of imagination, although Currin, we are assured, is a painter of great imagination) his paintings have nothing to do with any of these artists, neither in style nor content. Technically he may be marginally better than Hockney or Kitaj, but comparing Currin to Holbein is a cruel joke upon them both. Currin has more in common with Fischl, although he doesn't even achieve Fischl's nuancing~which is not meant as a compliment to Fischl. In thinking of the old masters, the following ideas come to mind: beauty, subtlety, depth, power, true emotion. Conversely, we are told that Currin excels in "cheap pathos", "vacant ritual images," and "fake sentiments." This is all meant by Kimmelman to be high praise. It is high praise because Koons and Richter are also masters of banality and vulgarity, like Warhol and all the rest before them. Rich and famous guys, all.
       The message is clear: the tenets and attitudes of Modernism are still very much alive, despite the supposed end of Postmoderism, the rise of Pluralism, and the resuscitation of Realism. Serious art is still out of fashion, and shallowness is still ascendant. What is required is transparent recombination coupled with an aloof pose. A plastic technique propped up by an imitation artist. An ersatz form representing an ersatz idea created by an ersatz person. The people who matter in NYC are still fascinated by the "vacuous and desperate", i.e. themselves. They gravitiate to "intentionally bad painting" and "campy and debased subjects" since this leaves open the very real possibilities that they can hope to be subjects of well-known artists, or even the artists themselves (with the proper promotion).
       Kimmelman says that "Currin seems to enjoy the mildly creepy, fetishistic absurdity of his anachronistic women." And why should he not? He lives in big-city modern America; who else is there? Like the all the other contemporary painters who think holding a mirror to the public's pathetic self is artistically fascinating, Currin mimics its vulgarity, it squeals and cringes, and then it runs to buy more mascara and tighter pants. Of course art-as-pathology remains on top~to whom could art-as-subtlety-and-depth appeal to anymore? Where is the market? Poor librarians in Bangor or Bethesda don't drive the economy.
       If Currin's content is fake emotion, barbed wit, and cheap pathos, then he obviously has more in common with someone like Bruce Nauman~yesterday's child~and his technique is really beside the point. Nauman and Hirst and countless others have proved that such content requires no technical mastery at all. That is why some people are confused by Currin: they wonder why he went to all that trouble, just to give us the same old cleverly empty basket. Kimmelman tells us that "Eyes in Mr. Currin's work tend to be black holes, sucking up light." And even more specifically, "Mary O'Connell's eyes, flat disks, are the emotional vortex of the picture." There is the contradiction that drives the mystery: how can vacuous eyes be an emotional vortex, how can art be driven by a theory in which vacuity and banality are positive virtues, and how can art history possibly be served by newspaper copy that offers up such theory as the ne plus ultra of culture, as fascinating fare for the educated and discerning reader?


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