Yeah, I didn’t think you were gunning at Kurt. I just don’t see a problem acknowledging Prince’s work as art, or in him terming them paintings, which drew the ire of a small but vocal cohort. I think we should be free and encouraged to say when something is bad, anti-humane, hyped, or whatever. I just worry that if we try to establish and police borders about what can and can’t be considered art then we’re liable to exclude something interesting, merely through the establishment of capricious boundaries. Like, does the establishment of such hierarchies or boundaries help people/artists/viewers, or does it harm them? Could it harm them? I honestly don’t know, but I’m always hesitant. I worry that they help conservative established voices at the expense of younger, more inventive ones. (Admittedly, Prince, at his age, with his wealth, at Gagosian, is not a good example in my favor.) Anyway, my point is still that people should be free to make what they want. It’s the cynical and venal rhetoric of genius and value used to promote such objects that I detest, far more than the objects themselves.

I’ll first admit to the obvious provocation in what I suggest. I do so in the hope that in throwing a wrench into a discussion I feel is going nowhere may start a more substantive discussion. Be assured that I do not mean that Kurt’s piece fails to hit several significant points in its argument. What I mean is that criticism is ineffective because critics are not willing to go to the barricades, thus ceding the ground to the most assertive forces, followed by a population of indeterminate size who seem content with rolling their eyes. Once a piece is called art there seems no stopping it from entering the deck of cards critics must play. And once the piece is elevated by a gallery or museum by merely putting it on the wall, we hand all critical parameters over to whomever can afford a wall in NYC.

Yes, an openness to new ideas is the bedrock of art as we understand it. That may be the problem. We’re deluding ourselves into complacency, pretending there are no such things as earthquakes.

But, Peter, isn’t the problem not whether or not they’re called “art,” but whether they’re presented as profound, significant, or valuable? Like, why should we need to put up barricades? Isn’t this just as much or more art than the lazy muralist making paintings with their stencils, the redundant splatter painter making bad impressions of Jackson Pollock, the guy at the flea market who sells his black velvet Jesus paintings, Jackson Pollock himself, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, etc?

I don’t know what the use of those barriers is except with regard to money and attention. Richard Prince and anyone else should be free, encouraged even, to make whatever they want and call their work art just like we should be free to ignore it, take a rhetorical hatchet to it, praise it, or whatever. I kind of think that Prince’s show is a bit of a wry gambit and a short-lived joke, but the importance that some may claim for them is stupid and kind of cynical.