I Am All For Art's Finding A

As I Made My Way Through 'on Line,' The Austere, Stridently Dogmatic, Sometimes Revelatory Exhibition 'about Line' At Moma, I Found Myself Thinking, 'someone Please Wake Me When The Seventies Are Over!' In The Empire Of Curators, The Sun Never Sets On The Seventies. It Is The Undead Decade.

Imagine It's 1981. You're An Artist, In Love With Art, Smitten With Art History. You're Also A Woman, With Almost No Mentors To Look To; Art History Just Isn't That Into You. Any Woman Approaching Art History In The Early Eighties Was Attempting To Enter An Almost Foreign Country, A Restricted And Exclusionary Domain That Spoke A Private Language.

You Can't Prove Rembrandt Is Better Than Norman Rockwell - Although If You Actually Do Prefer Rockwell, I'd Say You Were Shunning Complexity, Were Secretly Conservative, And Hadn't Really Looked At Either Painter's Work. Taste Is A Blood Sport.

Living And Working For Four Decades In A Bologna Apartment And Studio He Shared With His Unwed Sisters, Morandi Painted Little But Bottles, Boxes, Jars, And Vases. Yet Like That Of Chardin And The Underappreciated William Nicholson, Morandi's Work Seems To Slow Down Time And Show You Things You've Never Seen Before.

While A Large Segment Of The Art World Has Obsessed Over A Tiny Number Of Stars And Their Prices, An Aesthetic Shift Has Been Occurring. It's Not A Movement - Movements Are More Sure Of Themselves. It's A Change Of Mood Or Expectation, A Desire For Art To Be More Than Showy Effects, Big Numbers, And Gamesmanship.