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Can Space Break? I Mean The Space Of Art Galleries. Over The Past 100 Years, Art Galleries Have Gone From Looking Like Beaux Arts Salons To Simple Storefronts To Industrial Lofts To The Gleaming Giant White Cubes Of Chelsea With Their Shiny Concrete Floors.

-Jerry Saltz

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Can Space Break? I

Jerry Saltz

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Can Space Break? I Mean The Space Of Art Galleries. Over The Past 100 Years, Art Galleries Have Gone From Looking Like Beaux Arts Salons To Simple Storefronts To Industrial Lofts To The Gleaming Giant White Cubes Of Chelsea With Their Shiny Concrete Floors.

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Can Space Break? I Mean The Space Of Art Galleries. Over The Past 100 Years, Art Galleries Have Gone From Looking Like Beaux Arts Salons To Simple Storefronts To Industrial Lofts To The Gleaming Giant White Cubes Of Chelsea With Their Shiny Concrete Floors.

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.

Many Things Happened In The Sixties, But The Period Is No More Significant, Better, Or More 'political' Than Today. It's Time To Turn The Page.

Kinkade's Paintings Are Worthless Schmaltz, And The Lamestream Media That Love Him Are Wrong. However, I'd Love To See A Museum Mount A Small Show Of Kinkade's Work. I Would Like The Art World And The Wider World To Argue About Him In Public, Out In The Open.

More And More In The Art World Are Becoming Moralistic, Telling Artists And Critics What They Should And Shouldn't Write, Do, Or Make Art About. Never Mind The Intellectual Hypocrisy Of This: Those Who Violate The Clublike Code Are Made Out To Be Wrong, Immoral, Corrupt.

Anyone Who Relishes Art Should Love The Extraordinary Diversity And Psychic Magic Of Our Art Galleries. There's Likely More Combined Square Footage For The Showing Of Art On One New York Block - West 24th Street Between Tenth And Eleventh Avenues - Than In All Of Amsterdam's Or Hamburg's Galleries.

Put Yourself In The Position Of An Up-and-coming Artist Living In Early-sixteenth-century Italy. Now Imagine Trying To Distinguish Yourself From The Other Artists Living In Your Town: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Or Titian. Is It Any Wonder That The Italian High Renaissance Lasted Only 30 Years?

Anybody Who Writes Knows The Horrible, Wonderful, Beautiful Foulness That Comes Every Week. A Lot Of Moaning, Screaming Agony - "oh My God, The Deadline's Coming."

Artschwager's Art Always Involves Looking Closely At Surfaces, Questions What An Object Is, Wants To Make You Forget The Name Of The Thing You're Looking At So That It Might Mushroom In Your Mind Into Something That Triggers Unexpected Infinities.

If Only We Could Persuade Galleries To Observe A Fallow Period In Which, For Two Months Every Other Year, New And Old Works Of Art Could Be Sold In Back Rooms And All Main Galleries Would Be Devoted To Revisiting Shows Gone By.

The Metropolitan Museum Of Art Is Unsurpassed At Presenting More Than 50 Centuries Of Work. I Go There Constantly, Seeing Things Over And Over, Better Than I've Ever Seen Them Before.

I've Always Said That An Art Critic Can Put Aside Politics Around Art.

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Now People Look At 'the Scream' Or Van Gogh's 'irises' Or A Picasso And See Its New Content: Money. Auction Houses Inherently Equate Capital With Value.

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I Hate When Dealers Talk To Me. I Love Dealers - They're Some Of Our Favorite People In The Art World. But I Hate If They Do A Sales Pitch On Me. I Can't Stand It.

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I Don't Know Much About Auctions. I Sometimes Go To Previews And See Art Sardined Into Ugly Rooms. I've Gawked At The Gaudy Prices, And Gaped At Well-clad Crowds Of Happy White People Conspicuously Spending Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars.

Chris Ofili's Suave, Stippled, Visually Tricked-out Paintings Of The Nineties, With Their Allover Fields Of Shimmering Dots And Clumps Of Dung, Are Like Cave Paintings Of Modern Life. They Crackle With Optical Cockiness, Love, And Massive Amounts Of Painterly Mojo.

I Wish I Could Write About Shows Outside New York. I Often Feel Like The Last Person To Know Anything, Because I Almost Never Get To Leave Town, And When I Do, I Tend To Go For Three Days Max. Seeing Between 30 And 40 Shows A Week In 100 Or So Galleries And Museums Takes Up Nearly All My Time.

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After Its Hothouse Incubation In The Seventies, Appropriation Breathed Important New Life Into Art. This Life Flowered Spectacularly Over The Decades - Even If It's Now Close To Aesthetic Kudzu.

Pictures Artists Staged Their Own Images Or Copied Or Cut Out Others Already In Existence. The Viewer Took Them In Separately, In Sometimes Paradoxical Waves: An Original Image, Then The Manipulations Of It, Then The Places Where Image And Idea Intersected. This Created A Crucial Perceptual Glitch That Irony And Understanding Filled.

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Maybe The Museum [of Arts And Design ]needs To Follow The Advice Of Its Acronym And Not Be Afraid To Go A Little M.a.d.

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The New York Gallery Scene Being As Incredibly Overpopulated And Overmoneyed As It Is, Deep Conflicts And Contradictions Aren't Hard To Find.

Megacollectors Suppose They Can Enter Art History By Spending Astronomical Amounts.

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I Am All For Art's Finding A Large Audience. But The Way That's Happening Now, With Big Works Filling Big Galleries And Bigger Shows, Is Mostly Stopping Statements From Being Made. Or Heard. Or Talked About. Or Really Examined. It's Watering Things Down.

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'untitled' Is A Time Machine That Can Transport You To 1992, An Edgy Moment When The Art World Was Crumbling, Money Was Scarce, And Artists Like Tiravanija Were In The Nascent Stages Of Combining Happenings, Performance Art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, And The Do-it-yourself Ethos Of Punk. Meanwhile, A New Art World Was Coming Into Being.

Marlene Dumas Is One Of The Two Or Three Most Successful Female Artists Alive, If You Judge By Prices. I've Never Reviewed Her Work, Because I Find Nothing In It To Get Excited About No Matter How Hard I Look.

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The Price Of A Work Of Art Has Nothing To Do With What The Work Of Art Is, Can Do, Or Is Worth On An Existential, Alchemical Level.

While The Space For Artists And Curators Has Increased Enormously, Maybe, Just Maybe, That's Left Room For Too Many People Calling Themselves Artists And Curators Who Are Simply Not Up To The Term.

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Scandal Is Only Human.

The Art World Is Molting - Some Would Say Melting. Galleries Are Closing; Museums Are Scaling Back.

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Only An Artist As Preternaturally Acute And Copacetic, As Oddly Visionary And Just Odd As Richard Artschwager Would Be Able To Lay Out The Whole Course Of Human Evolution And Have It Make Some Kind Of Sense While Also Seeming Like A Dazzling Insight.

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All Great Contemporary Artists, Schooled Or Not, Are Essentially Self-taught And Are De-skilling Like Crazy. I Don't Look For Skill In Art... Skill Has Nothing To Do With Technical Proficiency... I'm Interested In People Who Rethink Skill, Who Redefine Or Reimagine It: An Engineer, Say, Who Builds Rockets From Rocks.

After Too Much Art That Made Too Much Sense, Artists Are Operating Blind Again. They're More Interested In The Possible Than The Probable, The Private That Speaks Publicly Rather Than The Public With No Private Side At All.

In 1998, Artnet Was The Site That Convinced Me That If My Writing Didn't Exist Online, It Didn't Exist At All. It Showed Me Criticism's Future.

Being Critical Of Art Is A Way Of Showing Art Respect.

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I Like That The Art World Isn't Regulated.

I Have Never Really Cooked, Don't Know How To Use My Dishwasher, And Subsist Mainly On Prepared Deli Takeout. I Don't Even Eat In Restaurants Much.

Ofili Is Still A Champion. It Would Be A Huge Mistake To Think Otherwise.

All Of Koons's Best Art - The Encased Vacuum Cleaners, The Stainless-steel Rabbit (the Late-twentieth Century's Signature Work Of Simulationist Sculpture), The Amazing Gleaming Balloon Dog, And The Cast-iron Re-creation Of A Civil War Mortar Exhibited Last Month At The Armory - Has Simultaneously Flaunted Extreme Realism, Idealism, And Fantasy.

It's Great That New York Has Large Spaces For Art. But The Enormous Immaculate Box Has Become A Dated, Even Oppressive Place. Many Of These Spaces Were Designed For Sprawling Installations, Large Paintings, And The Relational Aesthetics Work Of The Past Fifteen Years.

Biennial Culture Is Already Almost Irrelevant, Because So Many More People Are Providing So Many Better Opportunities For Artists To Exhibit Their Work.

A Metaphysical Tour De Force Of Untethered Meaning And Involuting Interlocking Contrapuntal Rhythms, 'the Clock' Is More Than A Movie Or Even A Work Of Art. It Is So Strange And Other-ish That It Becomes A Stream-of-consciousness Algorithm Unto Itself - Something Almost Inhuman.

Giant Group Events Are Distorting Organisms: You Can Like And Hate Them In Rapid Succession.

Not To Say People Shouldn't Get Rich From Art. I Adore The Alchemy Wherein Artists Who Cast A Complex Spell Make Rich People Give Them Their Money. (just Writing It Makes Me Cackle.) But Too Many Artists Have Been Making Money Without Magic.

Many Say An Art Dealer Running A Museum Is A 'conflict Of Interest.' But Maybe The Art World Has Lived An Artificial Or Unintentional Lie All Of These Years When It Comes To Conflicts Of Interest.

I'm Noticing A New Approach To Art Making In Recent Museum And Gallery Shows. It Flickered Into Focus At The New Museum's 'younger Than Jesus' Last Year And Ran Through The Whitney Biennial, And I'm Seeing It Blossom And Bear Fruit At 'greater New York,' Moma P.s. 1's Twice-a-decade Extravaganza Of Emerging Local Talent.

There's One Baldessari Work I Genuinely Love And Would Like To Own, Maybe Because Of My Midwestern Roots And Love Of Driving Alone. 'the Backs Of All The Trucks Passed While Driving From Los Angeles To Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 1963' Consists Of A Grid Of 32 Small Color Photographs Depicting Just What The Title Says.

Of Course Art World Ethics Are Important. But Museums Are No Purer Than Any Other Institution Or Business. Academics Aren't Necessarily More High-minded Than Gallerists.

Among Living Artists, George Condo May Be The Most Embraced By The Powers That Be.

A Great Artist Has A Unique Vision...obsession. They Are Someone Willing To Fail Flamboyantly.

Rumors Sound Of Galleries Asking Artists For Up-sized Art And More Of It... Everything Winds Up Set To Maximum In Order To Feed The Beast. Bigness Is Not All Bad. There's Something Pleasing About Large, Well-lit Spaces. But The Bigness Has Also Led To A Narrowing Of Sensibilities, By Making It Very Hard For Any But The Glitziest Works To Get Traction.

The Art World Is An All-volunteer Force. No One Has To Be Here If He Or She Doesn't Want To Be, And We Should Be Associating With Anyone We Want To.

The Giant White Cube Is Now Impeding Rather Than Enhancing The Rhythms Of Art. It Preprograms A Viewer's Journey, Shifts The Emphasis From Process To Product, And Lacks Individuality And Openness. It's Not That Art Should Be Seen Only In Rutty Bombed-out Environments, But It Should Seem Alive.

Billions Of Photos Are Shot Every Year, And About The Toughest Thing A Photographer Can Do Is Invent An Original, Deeply Personal, Instantly Recognizable Visual Style. In The Early Nineties, Wolfgang Tillmans Did Just That, Transforming Himself Into A New Kind Of Artist-photographer Of Modern Life.

The Debut Show, “second Lives: Remixing The Ordinary,” Is Supposed To Be About How Artists Reuse Humble Or Unusual Materials. There’s Good Work Here, But Much Of What’s On View Is Actually More About Obsession And Repetition: A Couch Made Out Of 3,500 Quarters, A Necklace Composed Of 100 Handgun Triggers. The Building, Too, Seems Caught Between Wanting To Be An Object Of Decorative Delectation And Making An Architectural Statement.

My Job As Art Critic Is To Watch Artists Dance Naked In Public, And Then I Will, In Turn, Dance Naked Critically In Public.

Early-twentieth-century Abstraction Is Art's Version Of Einstein's Theory Of Relativity. It's The Idea That Changed Everything Everywhere: Quickly, Decisively, For Good.

A Saboteur In The House Of Art And A Comedienne In The House Of Art Theory, Lawler Has Spent Three Decades Documenting The Secret Life Of Art. Functioning As A Kind Of One-woman Csi Unit, She Has Photographed Pictures And Objects In Collectors' Homes, In Galleries, On The Walls Of Auction Houses, And Off The Walls, In Museum Storage.

Kinkade Estimated That One Of His Paintings Hung In Every Twenty Homes In America. Yet The Art World Unanimously Ignores Or Reviles Him. Me Included.

If The Frieze Art Fair Catches On, I Imagine At Least Two Great Things Happening. First, We Will Once Again Have A Huge Art Fair In Town That Isn't Too Annoying To Go To. More Importantly, Frieze May Finally Show New Yorkers That We Can Cross Our Own Waters For Visual Culture. That Would Change Everything.

It Is Not Possible To Overstate The Influence Of Paul Cezanne On Twentieth-century Art. He's The Modern Giotto, Someone Who Shattered One Kind Of Picture-making And Invented A New One That The World Followed.

It Took The Metropolitan Museum Of Art Nearly 50 Years To Wake Up To Pablo Picasso. It Didn't Own One Of His Paintings Until 1946, When Gertrude Stein Bequeathed That Indomitable Quasi-cubistic Picture Of Herself - A Portrait Of The Writer As A Sumo Buddha - To The Met, Principally Because She Disliked The Museum Of Modern Art.

Once Artists Are Expected To Shock, It's That Much Harder For Them To Do So.

When Museums Are Built These Days, Architects, Directors, And Trustees Seem Most Concerned About Social Space: Places To Have Parties, Eat Dinner, Wine-and-dine Donors. Sure, These Are Important These Days - Museums Have To Bring In Money - But They Gobble Up Space And Push The Art Itself Far Away From The Entrance.

The Secret Of Food Lies In Memory - Of Thinking And Then Knowing What The Taste Of Cinnamon Or Steak Is.

Artists Working For Other Artists Is All About Knowing, Learning, Unlearning, Initiating Long-term Artistic Dialogues, Making Connections, Creating Covens, And Getting Temporary Shelter From The Storm.

Don't Talk. I Can't Hear Myself See.

Outside Museums, In Noisy Public Squares, People Look At People. Inside Museums, We Leave That Realm And Enter What Might Be Called The Group-mind, Getting Quiet To Look At Art.

Lucian Freud's Career Affirms That The Only Thing An Artist Can Do Is Remain True To Whatever Vision, (lack Of) Talent, Or Ideas That Happened To Pick Them In Order To Be Made Known To The World.

Contrary To Popular Opinion, Things Don't Go Stale Particularly Fast In The Art World.

When I Criticize Joseph Beuys Or Francis Bacon, Nobody Calls Those Opinions Anti-male. Putting Female Artists Or Their Subject Matter Off-limits Is Itself Sexist And Limiting.

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.

There's Something Pleasing About Large, Well-lit Spaces. I Love That Dealers Are Willing To Take Massive Chances In Order To Give This Much Room To Their Artists. Most Of All, I Love That More Galleries Showing More Art Gives More Artists A Shot.

The Place Has Had A Super-conflicted Relationship To Its Mission. In 1956, It Opened As The Museum Of Contemporary Crafts. Then In 1986 It Had A Midlife Crisis And Changed Its Name To The American Craft Museum. Then In 2002 The Name Changed Again, This Time To The Museum Of Arts And Design. Maybe In 2025 The Place Will Be Called The Designatorium. The Big Problem With A Museum Of Craft And Design Is That All Art Has Craft And Design.

The Greatest Work Of Art About New York? The Question Seems Nebulous. The City's Magic And Majesty Are Distilled In The Photographs Of Alfred Stieglitz And Paul Strand.

Where Cezanne Captured And Intensified Shards Of The Eternal (every Pear Far More Sharply Defined Than It Could Be In Life), Monet Portrayed The Changeability And Flux Of Every Moment. 'the Water Lilies' Give You A Jittery, Amorphous Sense Of A World Seen At The Speed Of Light.

A Canon Is Antithetical To Everything The New York Art World Has Been About For The Past 40 Years, During Which We Went From Being The Center Of The Art World To Being One Of Many Centers.

The Last Time Money Left The Art World, Intrepid Types Maxed Out Their Credit Cards And Opened Galleries, And A Few Of Them Have Become The Best In The World.

One Argument Goes That Recessions Are Good For Female Artists Because When Money Flies Out The Window, Women Are Allowed In The House. The Other Claims That When Money Ebbs, So Do Prospects For Women.

Any Negative Review You Write, They'll Say, "oh, You're Being So Mean." I Think The Problem With A Lot Of Criticism Is That Too Many Critics Either Write Just Description Or They Write In A Mandarin Jargon That Only A Handful Of People Can Understand, Or They Write Happy Criticis - Everything Is Good That They Write About. I Think That's Really Not Good. I Think It's Damaged A Lot Of Our Critical Voices.

I Have A Soft Spot For Art That, In Terms Of Subject Matter And Material, Is In Bad Taste.

Energy And Art Go Where They Will.

I See 30 To 40 Gallery Shows A Week, And No Matter What Kind Of Mood I'm In, No Matter How Bad The Art Is, I Almost Always Feel Better Afterward. I Can Learn As Much From Bad Art As From Good.

Auction Houses Run A Rigged Game. They Know Exactly How Many People Will Be Bidding On A Work And Exactly Who They Are. In A Gallery, Works Of Art Need Only One Person Who Wants To Pay For Them.

When Art Wins, Everyone Wins.

A Lot Of People Still Think Caring About Clothes Is A Dubious, Unserious, Frivolous, Girlie Thing.

Don’t Go To A Museum With A Destination. Museums Are Wormholes To Other Worlds. There Are Ecstasy Machines. Follow Your Eyes To Wherever They Lead You, Stop, Get Very Quiet, And The World Should Begin To Change For You. And If You See Me, Say Something! We Can Talk About It Together.

Any Critic Will Tell You That There Are A Few Dealers Where You Get A Little Bit Scared To Go Into Their Gallery, And That's Unfair To Them, To Yourself, To The Reader, And To The Artist. But I Just Want To Look. When I'm Done Looking And Writing, I Love Talking To Art Dealers. They Are So Alive And Interesting And Amazing - From Larry Gagosian All The Way On Down.

Too Many Younger Artists, Critics, And Curators Are Fetishizing The Sixties, Transforming The Period Into A Deformed Cult, A Fantasy Religion, A Hip Brand, And A Crippling Disease.

Few Contemporary Artists Mined The Space Between The Ordinary And The Strange Better Than Orozco Did.

All Great Contemporary Artists, Schooled Or Not, Are Essentially Self-taught And Are De-skilling Like Crazy.

In Some Ways Lawler Is A Conceptual Diane Arbus. She's A Stalker Who Takes Advantage Of Situations. She Pulls Back Curtains, Causing Normal Things To Look Freakish And The Freakish To Turn Mundane.

Yes, 85 Percent Of The Art You See Isn't Any Good. But Everyone Has A Different Opinion About Which 85 Percent Is Bad. That In Turn Creates Fantastically Unstable Interplay And Argument.

I Think That Writing Is A Process That Tells You What You Think. You Sometimes Actually Don't Know What Your Opinion Is Until You Hear Yourself Trying To Piece It Out And Have It Make Sense To You. The Process Itself Is So Bizarre And Mysterious That You Never Know What It's Going To Tell You.

Venice Is The Perfect Place For A Phase Of Art To Die. No Other City On Earth Embraces Entropy Quite Like This Magical Floating Mall.

Appropriation Is The Idea That Ate The Art World. Go To Any Chelsea Gallery Or International Biennial And You'll Find It. It's There In Paintings Of Photographs, Photographs Of Advertising, Sculpture With Ready-made Objects, Videos Using Already-existing Film.

Artistic Qualities That Once Seemed Undeniable Don't Seem So Now. Sometimes These Fluctuations Are Only Fickleness Of Taste, Momentary Glitches In An Artist's Work, Or An Artist Getting Ahead Of His Audience (it Took Me Ten Years To Catch Up To Albert Oehlen). Other Times, However, These Problems Mean There's Something Wrong With The Art.

The Art Gods Cooked Up Something Special For James Ensor.

Something Special

To Engage With Art, We Have To Be Willing To Be Wrong, Venture Outside Our Psychic Comfort Zones, Suspend Disbelief, And Remember That Art Explores And Alters Consciousness Simultaneously.

The Style Of Ancient Egyptian Art Is Transcendently Clear, Something 8-year-olds Can Recognize In An Instant. Its Consistency And Codification Is One Of The Most Epic Visual Journeys In All Art, One That Lasts 30 Dynasties Spread Over 3,000 Years.

Those Who Love Him Love That He Sells The Most Art; They Take It As A Point Of Faith That This Proves Kinkade Is The Best. But His Fans Don't Only Rely On This Supply-and-demand Justification. They Go Back To Values.

John Baldessari, The 79-year-old Conceptualist, Has Spent More Than Four Decades Making Laconic, Ironic Conceptual Art-about-art, Both Good And Bad.

Living And Working For Four Decades In A Bologna Apartment And Studio He Shared With His Unwed Sisters, Morandi Painted Little But Bottles, Boxes, Jars, And Vases. Yet Like That Of Chardin And The Underappreciated William Nicholson, Morandi's Work Seems To Slow Down Time And Show You Things You've Never Seen Before.

Photography Is The Easiest Thing To Make, And One Of The Hardest Things To Make Well.

To Me, Nothing In The Art World Is Neutral. The Idea Of 'disinterest' Strikes Me As Boring, Dishonest, Dubious, And Uninteresting.

In The Seventies, A Group Of American Artists Seized The Means Not Of Production But Of Reproduction. They Tore Apart Visual Culture At A Time Of No Money, No Market, And No One Paying Attention Except Other Artists. Vietnam And Watergate Had Happened; Everything In America Was Being Questioned.

Art Usually Only Makes The News In America When The Subject Is Money.

I Love Art Dealers. In Some Ways, They're My Favorite People In The Art World. Really. I Love That They Put Their Money Where Their Taste Is, Create Their Own Aesthetic Universes, Support Artists, Employ People, And Do All Of This While Letting Us See Art For Free. Many Are Visionaries.

New Yorkers Only Cross Water For Visual Culture If The Water Is An Ocean. The East River Throws Us For A Huge Loop. If We Started Going To Queens And The Bronx For Visual Culture, Many Of Our Rent, Space, And Crowding Problems Would Be Over Indefinitely.

I Often Find Myself Privately Stewing About Much British Art, Thinking That Except For Their Tremendous Gardens, That The English Are Not Primarily Visual Artists, And Are, In Nearly Unsurpassable Ways, Literary.

Calling A Young Artist 'great' These Days Can Give One The Heebie-jeebies: The Word Has Been Denatured In The Past Decade.

Poor Georgia O'keeffe. Death Didn't Soften The Opinions Of The Art World Toward Her Paintings.

Georgia O Keeffe

I Don't Want To Hear At All What The Artist Thinks About His Art. And I'm Not Writing For The Artist. I'm Writing For The Reader, And I Want To Tell The Reader What I Think.

Galleries Began Growing In Both Number And Size In The Late Seventies, When Artists Who Worked In Lofts Wanted To Exhibit Their Work In Spaces Similar To The Ones The Art Was Made In.

Think Of An Abstract Painting As Very, Very Low Relief - A Thing, Not A Picture.

Abstract Painting

I Think That Cynicism Is The Enemy. Cynicism Thinks It Knows How Things Work. "oh Yeah, You Know How That Works." I Think Uncertainty Is The Thing You Have To Keep Embracing. You Have To Keep Saying, I Actually Don't Know, And Going Out Is Going To Tell Me Something Every Time.

When Money And Hype Recede From The Art World, One Thing I Won't Miss Will Be What Curator Francesco Bonami Calls The 'eventocracy.' All This Flashy 'art-fair Art' And Those Highly Produced Space-eating Spectacles And Installations Wow You For A Minute Until You Move On To The Next Adrenaline Event.

The Met Is Not Only The Finest Encyclopedic Museum Of Art In The United States; It Is Arguably The Finest Anywhere.

My Nominee For Best Picture Of The Year - Maybe The Best Picture Ever, Because It's Essentially Made Up Of And Is An Ecstatic Love Letter To All Other Movies - Is Christian Marclay's Endlessly Enticing Must-see Masterpiece 'the Clock.'

The Very Paradigm Of Revolution, Of Right Versus Wrong, Good Versus Bad, Is A Relic With No Bearing On The Present. Yet Artists, Exhibitions, And Curators Valorize The Sixties. People Who Wrote About These Artists 30 Years Ago Still Write About Them In The Same Ways, Often For The Same Magazines.

Art Is Good, Bad, Boring, Ugly, Useful To Us Or Not.

Abstraction Brings The World Into More Complex, Variable Relations; It Can Extract Beauty, Alternative Topographies, Ugliness, And Intense Actualities From Seeming Nothingness.

It Took Me Twenty Years To Get Steven Parrino's Work. From The Time I First Saw His Art, In The Mid-eighties, I Almost Always Dismissed It As Mannered, Romantic, Formulaic, Conceptualist-formalist Heavy-metal Boy-art Abstraction.

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