News and Events

From the Village Voice-
Painting à la Mode by Jerry Saltz December 4 - 10, 2002:

"I love painting; so do you. But hear this: Not with standing its near death experience (what one critic called its "passage through the eye of the Minimal-Conceptual needle in the late 1960s and early 1970s"), except for a few curmudgeons, the pleasure police at October, some pedantic curators, and maybe Arthur Danto, no one thinks painting is dead. More importantly, no one has actually thought this since the Nixon administration.

We need to get over the painting-as-victim-and-victor complex. Painting is much in evidence in galleries and art schools. As always, collectors covet it. Like many recurrent avant-garde ideas, this one is self-serving belly-button gazing. We need to stop thinking painting is fighting for its life and that we're saving it. It isn't and we're not.

Nonetheless, many painters seek shelter in this position, cling to it, or act as if they were involved in some sort of noble rescue mission. The only thing painting needs rescuing from is those presumptuous artists who treat it as if it needs protecting—the ones who think theirs was the last generation that really understood the medium. Painting is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented, and among the most effective ways to alter reality, see it better, or invent a new one. Painting gives permission, it doesn't ask for it; it not only
explores consciousness, it changes it."