Populist Anger

Our most prominent NY art critics also have populist anger. I kind of like it.

Christian Viveros-Fauné (glad he’s back!) writes in the Voice this week about how boring East Coast minimalism is:

Minimal art—let's face it—is a bore. With all the cheerfulness of a leper's bell, it proposes that its preachy abstemiousness is somehow good for us […] Regular folks hate it, and who can blame them? When I go to the supermarket, I hardly expect to celebrate empty shelves. […]Take the Vietnam Memorial, for example—that Death Star of content-crunching monumentality. Excepting the names of the poor fuckers chiseled into it, the austere pile hallows America's war dead just as easily as it might extol the athleticism of the Bataan Death March.

And Peter Schjelejadjlaljdahl in the New Yorker deems the exhibition of drawings by the Mannerist Bronzino at the Met as appropriate for our age of unoriginal, sensationalized mishmash – but why look down on it?

It’s unsettling to read such judgments, by smart men [snooty art historians of the past], on art that looks so good at present […] The old verdicts suggest a proactive condemnation – of our own era – which, for all we know, future generations may come to endorse. Meanwhile, we are doing the best we can in the twenty-first century, things being as they are; and anyone who wants our friendship had better be civil to Bronzino.

As long as this doesn’t mean that I have to become exciting as an artist, or worse, ironic, this all seems refreshing to me. For now.