Of similar opinion

From this week's ever-anticipated Schjeldahl review :

"Ryman is a favorite of certain academic critics who, loyal to intellectual adventures of avant-garde art in the fifties and sixties, ignore most contemporary art and seem to mark time until a new development, or Second Coming, merits their engagement. Still, Ryman stays fresh and taut. Even out of date, his conscientious integrity ought to abash today’s hordes of careering youngsters, whose idea of the future of civilization reaches little beyond the next art fair. But to be shameable, under present conditions, may be an unaffordable moral luxury.

...

Is all of this a mite thin and forced? It is, along with almost everything else of recent vintage in an art world where frenetic production has outrun any substantial supply line of ideas. Nearly a century of experiments in abstraction have become a fund of handy tropes. What’s lost—while being barely preserved, with monkish zeal, by the likes of Ryman—is a sense of risk at the frontiers of convention. Pablo Picasso once zeroed in on the fundamental problem of abstract art, which he rejected, as “only painting. What about drama?” He added, “There is no abstract art.… A person, an object, a circle are all ‘figures’; they react on us more or less intensely.” The best modern abstract artists countered with jolting demonstrations of art’s intrinsic powers, independent of worldly reference. But their project proved self-defeating, as the looks of a Pollock or a Mondrian became just additional items in the world’s image bank, alongside Titian nudes and Mickey Mouse. Picasso’s cynical wisdom (minus his driving genius, of course) is common sense now, as artists like those in “Comic Abstraction” mix and match stock elements, with ever less drama and with intensity dwindling away. "

I can't wait to be inspired again.

Posted: Friday - March 16, 2007 at 01:17 AM |