For anyone who thinks that art critics and museum curators are subjective and look at every show that they review or select with a clear, subjective eye, free from agendas and prejudices: Wake up!

Case in point. Today's Post has a rare Saturday visual arts review by Paul Richard, who retired a while back as that paper's Chief Art Critic.

Richard writes a very good, elegant and informative review of Mississippi artist Walter Anderson (1903-1965) from Anderson's show: "Walter Inglis Anderson: Everything I See Is New and Strange" at the Smithsonian Institution's Arts and Industries Building, on the Mall next to the Castle.

Richard was "amazed" by Anderson's work and writes that "the makers of great American watercolors -- Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, John Marin, Charles Demuth -- are a select few. Anderson is worthy of inclusion in that company."

Anderson's life (described well by Richard in the review) reads like a twisted, and odd, and interesting life. His watercolors look like this and the one on the left (copyright family of W. Anderson).

And this brings me to the point of my first paragraph about critics and curators.

First curators: Richard informs the reader that "The Hirshhorn, the Phillips and the Corcoran glanced at the idea of exhibiting the Andersons sent on tour this year by the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs, but nothing came of it. Their mistake."

My opinion: With the exception of maybe (a looooong maybe) the Phillips, I don't think any dead American artist with Anderson's background and subject matter would ever get a microsecond of interest from the Hirshhorn or the Corcoran, unless there were a lot of other sundry variables in the offer. It's just not where these curators' interest and focus are aimed at the moment.

About critics....

Richard's replacement at the Post as the new Chief Art Critic was Blake Gopnik, who came to the Post from the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail.

And Gopnik's background, education, training and formation - and thus his subjectivity, agendas and likes and dislikes - are radically different from Richard. This gives us two men who held and now hold the same powerful pulpit with two very different views of what is good art.

I think that the chances that Gopnik would be "amazed" by Anderson's art are about the same as the chances that Laura Bush will elope with Osama Bin Laden. In fact I think that in Gopnik's books, the Anderson show may just beat the J. Seward Johnson show at the Corcoran that Gopnik brutalized a few weeks ago when he wrote: "This is the worst museum exhibition I've ever seen."

And this is where it could be fun (I've rambled too long).

Wouldn't it be fun if the Post sent both Richard and Gopnik to review the same show and then publish the former and current Chief Art Critic's views and points and words about the exact same show? And to make it more interesting - don't let them in on the idea.

It would not only be a great service to readers to see two points of view (like the Editorial page is sometimes supposed to do) applied to the fragile world of art criticism, but also a lesson to all who'll then discover that art critics, like wine critics, are a product of their own tastes, and not arbiters of what is good or bad in art.

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