Ladybug’s Reviews > The Painted Word > Status Update

we just got rid of the little rows of hung pictures, not to mention a couple of superannuated critics, &we've gotten rid of illusion, representational objects, the 3rd dimension, pigment (or most of it), brushstrokes, &now frames &canvas— but what about the wall itself? What about the very idea of a work of art as sth
"on a wall" at all? How very pre-Modern!

No, in an age of avant-gardism the only possible strategy to counter a new style which you detest is to leapfrog it. You abandon your old position and your old artists, leaping over the new style, land beyond it, point back to it, and say: "Oh, that's nothing. I've found something newer and better., way out here."

Abstract expressionism’s makers and theorists and its truly committed audience seem to be one and the same.

There were brave &patriotic collectors who created a little flurry of activity on the Abstract Expressionist market in the late 1950s, but in general this type of painting was depreciating faster than a Pontiac Bonneville once it left the showroom. The resale market was a shambles. W/o the museums to step in here &there, to buy in the name of history, Abstract Expressionism was becoming a beached whale commercially

A hundred years before, Art Theory had merely been something that enriched one's conversation in matters of Culture. Now it was an absolute necessity. It was no longer background music. It was an essential hormone in the mating ritual. All we ask for is a few lines of explanation!

Th game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened. The public that bought books in hardcover &paperback by the millions, the public that buys records by the billions & fills stadiums 4 a concerts, the public that spends $100 million on a single movie this public affects taste, theory, and artistic outlook in literature, music, &drama. The same has never been true in art

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anythig a Modern Art, the notion that the public scorns, ignores, fails to comprehend, allows to wither, crushes the spirit of, or commits any other crime against Art or any individual artists r merely a romantic fiction, a bittersweet Trilby sentiment.

the Modernists, Braque &Bros., completed almost all their stylistic innovations before WWI, &Modern Art seems to belong to the postwar period. It is simply bc the Boho Dance took place before the war &the Consummation took place afterward. This is not what is described as the lag b/w "the artist's discoveries"& "public acceptance." Public? The public plays no part in the process whatsoever. The public is not invited

Not “seeing is believing” but “ believing is seeing”, for modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text

for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (lout le monde) knew to be there-waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well-how very shortsighted!