Recently by John Haber

I can't resist sharing my admiration and ambivalence for Chuck Close, with a few excerpts from a review of his retrospective a few years back, since I think it's one of the best reviews I've done. If I may, I'd like also to commend you to a defense of Richter and to a discussion of another blurry portrait, by Rembrandt centuries before.

It also gets at several issues that you guys are just going to have to stop wishing away. Ok, so some theorists dismissed art's authenticity after photography, in our "age of mechanical reproduction." And your response: shout down the artists who work through it to new creative directions. No wonder the art can be dismissed "on philosophical grounds." It might question the cozy little realm of academic painting we're trying to salvage.

Above the fold, I'll just offer my review's epigraph:

But modern portraits by English painters, what of them? Surely they are like the people they pretend to represent.
          Quite so. They are so like them that a hundred years from now no one will believe in them.
      — Oscar Wilde

In another thread, started by Mark, Shark defends two serious assaults on the very viability of art after Modernism—or, to put more accurately, to art after a particularly conservative view of Modernism. This one sees formalism as estheticism. Thirty years ago, Hilton Kramer found that embodied not in Pollock or de Kooning, whom he despised, but in Marsden Hartley. It amounted to the politicization of contemporary art as a mirror of the culture wars that conservatives keep fighting, long after most culture no longer cares. Shark singles out for praise two recent rear-guard fighters, Jed Perl and Roger Kimball. The first has the advantage of actually knowing something about and liking art, as well as keeping his own views on politics largely to himself.

Books from conservatives on how ideology (presumably not their ideology) have led to the decline and fall of civilization extend well beyond the arts, but I usually feel compelled to review the ones that do fall in my field. It is like one of those video games or Bop a Mole, where you kill them but they keep popping back.

"The whole art world is a fraud." One can always count on that theme to sell a few books or magazines.

It appeals to a public unease with art since Modernism, even while people pack the modern museum. It appeals to qualms about soaring prices, even as auctions only add to a work's aura and the public's reverence. It appeals to a phony right-wing populism that still plays politically, directed perversely at artists, scholars, and others on the outside of real wealth and power. No wonder it appeals, too, to The New York Times.

Here it is mid-August, and I am only just now telling you about the summer's most exciting show. I mean "Dada," and if I have taken far too long to break the news, you can easily understand why.

For once a blockbuster does what the word suggests. Instead of attracting long, orderly lines, the explosion leaves shrapnel everywhere. For a movement dedicated to destroying fine art, Dada sure made a lot of it. At least they left a great deal of its wreckage behind. At the Museum of Modern Art through September 11, Dada spans two entrances, six cities, and four hundred fifty objects. It may never look this deft, messy, and just plain artful again.

What happened to the idea of art films? Great question, and since it's got me thinking, let me dare a full post instead of a comment. I'll argue that, first, film became accepted as art, including mainstream film. Second, an outsider venue for art films became less crucial, thanks to video. But could those assumptions be changing as money centralizes yet again? NOTE ADDED: You'll see that I embellished this, because I wasn't satisfied with how it ended.

Who could imagine the Fourth without the flag everywhere in sight? And the Whitney has ushered in the holiday with a classic sighting. In "Full House," a museum-wide celebration of American art, a Jasper Johns flag painting welcomes visitors to the third floor. But suppose a constitutional amendment, banning desecration of the flag. Would those images still have a home?

When an artist dies young, one wants always to remember her that way, as if she never could grow old. Everything she did comes weighted down with mortality and promise. However, she also remains oddly accessible. I feel I could still go up to her at an opening without apologizing too much. I could congratulate her, thank her for the inspiration, and ask how she ever pulled it off. What exactly goes into those thick, creepy constructions, other than fear and pleasure?