In March of 2003, Art in America published Raphael Rubinstein's seismic essay "A Quiet Crisis" which decried the state of art criticism as “passive and interpretive and urged a return to value judgment and qualitative comparison in its analysis of contemporary art.” This essay has incited a heated discussion in the art world about what criticism should be and might become. This collection of essays is the body of writing that lead to Rubinstein's challenge.
Visual pleasure, formal complexity, and the erotics of abstraction are the themes at the core of this book. The collection opens with essays on three artists who joined the post-World War II wave of American expatriates in Paris, and whose work was deeply influenced by Matisse: Norman Bluhm, Shirley Jaffe and George Sugarman. They constitute, Rubinstein argues, an alternative tradition to the dominant styles of Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Also included are writings on Philip Guston, David Reed, Francesco Clemente, Alice Neel, Lydia Dona, Trevor Winkfield, Support/Surfaces and other innovative artists of our time.
Rubinstein has been a major arts writer and critic for the past 17 years and is currently Senior Editor at Art in America. (MORE)





.hard press editions
[ EXCERPT ]

“As contemporary art has become increasingly institutional and professionalized, art critics seem to spend too much time articulating and justifying consensus opinions. Some of us do this quite brilliantly, but I’m more interested in operating at the margins, in acting as a counterweight to market and institutional forces. I also want to question the mostly unspoken notion that today’s museums and collectors will never make the mistakes of the past, that every deserving artist is “discovered,” that no contemporary master will turn out to be a pompier. The history of esthetics tells us that no institution or individual is infallible, and that future generations will look at some of the artists championed by, say, the Museum of Modern Art or Charles Saatchi, and laugh their heads off. “

“There is nothing less interesting to me than writing about an artist who has already been canonized by the museum-university complex, just as there’s nothing more exciting for me than to write about an artist or group of artists whose work has no yet gained the recognition it deserves.”

[ REVIEWS ]

“The play Rubinstein discovers between history, geography and artistic continuity in contemporary abstraction…is truly original and revelatory.” - Katherine R. Lieber, Artscope.net

Read what Artcritical.com has to say about this book