I’m not sure exactly what Jay’s gripe is, other than blasting the sin of having unclear academic writing style in a newspaper, but the point of the Times review of the Fogg/Sackler Museum’s new Frank Stella exhibit doesn’t seem to me all that obscure: Stella’s minimalist "Black paintings" were seen as a sensation when they came out but have suffered in stature since; the Harvard exhibit attempts to ressucitate their stature by telling a narrative of Stella’s development as artist; and the critic, Roberta Smith, ends up liking the colorful abstract expressionism of the earlier student-y paintings better than the minimal "Black paintings" and hence finds the kinds of development narratives art historians use to be unconvincing. I’ve not yet seen the Sackler exhibit, so I can’t weigh in on the merits of that judgment, though I do find Smith’s implication that artists’ judgments of other artists is the end-all of aesthetic judgment to be an odd one.
In other arts-coverage news, JL takes on Charles Pierce’s puff piece on MFA’s Malcom Rogers with justified savagery.
UPDATE: Jay replies that indeed Smith’s tortured prose was his intended target.
UPDATE2: Kriston features Roberta Smith over at Eye Level.
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