Saturday, May 15, 2004

Do you want to know why art criticism can never ever be objective, but always comes loaded with a critic's personal agenda?

Read Blake Gopnik's piece in the Post. Gopnik does not like painting, and subscribes to the somewhat dated and debunked theory that "painting is dead."

Since painting refuses to die, and collectors refuse to let it die, and dealers refuse to let it die, and curators refuse to let it die, the pushers of this antiquated theory that once made news in the 60s, try to rationalize it, as Gopnik brilliantly does in this piece.

However, once you realize that this is on the "agenda" of a particular art scribe, it sounds as empty now as it did in ther 1960s.

Notice how he labels Robert Hughes, one of the planet's most respected and influential art critics, and probably the best-known contemporary art critic in the world, as "Conservative" simply because Hughes would bury the "painting is dead" slogan in the same grave as "happenings" from the 60s and 70s.

It is a shame that such a gifted and influential writer as the Washington Post's chief art critic is, will go all the way to London to visit that distant city's art galleries, but cannot be bothered to visit or write about his own city's art galleries on a regular basis.

Yawn...

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